Sidney Nolan
Painted Ned Kelly as a black helmet with a slot in it, and made Australia's defining image.
Sidney Nolan was born in Melbourne in 1917, worked in a hat factory, and deserted from the Australian army in 1944 — which is part of why the outlaw suited him. The first Ned Kelly series, twenty-seven paintings made in 1946 and 1947 in Ripolin enamel on hardboard, reduces Kelly to a flat black armoured helmet with a rectangular slot against the flat ochre of the bush, and remains the most recognisable image in Australian art. He also painted Burke and Wills, Gallipoli, the drought carcasses and Leda. He settled in Britain, was knighted, and died in 1992.
This is principally an Australian market, though Nolan's long British residence gives it a London component. The first Kelly series is in the National Gallery of Australia; later Kelly paintings, of which there are many across four decades, form the core of what trades and are valued by date and quality rather than by subject alone. Ripolin enamel on hardboard is the recurring condition problem — the board warps and the enamel cracks and lifts. Works on paper and prints are numerous, and forgeries of the Kelly images exist.
If you own a work by Sidney Nolan
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.