Albert Namatjira (1902-1959) East Side Ranges, Jay Creek, c.1957

Albert Namatjira (1902-1959)
East Side Ranges, Jay Creek, c.1957
signed lower right: 'ALBERT NAMATJIRA'
watercolour on paper
17.0 x 26.0cm (6 11/16 x 10 1/4in).
PROVENANCE
Books Robinson Pty Ltd, Melbourne
Private collection
Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 13 November 2006, lot 191
Private collection, New South Wales

EXHIBITED
Catalogue of Originals by Albert Namatjira and other members of the Aranda Tribe, Brooks Robinson Pty Ltd, Melbourne, 26 May - 7 June, 1958, cat. 28

It was Namatjira's mentor, teacher and friend Rex Battarbee, who first suggested that the artist's framing of scenes was influenced by his interest in photography. In doing so, the artist offered viewers neatly framed views of the Australian landscape, presenting pictorial journeys through his country. The carefully considered compositional elements in his East Side Ranges, Jay Creek, alludes to this photographic reference. Whilst the central subject of this work, as in most of Namatijra's watercolours, is the country of the Western Aranda itself, the pale ghost gum in its stark light colouring illuminates and guides the composition. Alison French observes; 'The trees in Namatjira's work are often subjects in their own right and play a pivotal role in leading our eye into the inner recesses of the image... In most instances, a giant river gum fills the frame to the left or right of the composition, in the shallow viewing space that Namatjira invites us to share. We gaze past this tree and the intervening middle ground to another motif: a mountain range...'1. Namatjira also uses contrasts in colour and tone to topographically separate the different elements of the ranges in the background, and the desert in the foreground. An interplay of light on the different surfaces unifies those separate elements through the suggestion of season and time of day. Here the audience gets to experience the spectacle of the panoramic, with the intimate relationship Namatijira had with his country.

The medium of watercolour is significant due to its illusory softness, enhancing the romantic feeling towards the landscape. Watercolour brought audiences from cities around Australia who had never seen the central desert, to consider the country in a different light. Galarrwuy Yunupingu notes, Namatjira "was demonstrating to the rest of the world the living title held by his people to the lands they had been on for thousands of years."2 It was so impactful that he and his wife became the first Australian citizens, a decade before any other aboriginal. As Philip Jones comments, "By mastering the art of landscape painting he was the first Aranda man to take a European cultural item and, in a subversive sense, to make it his own."3 So, whilst Namatjira may have adopted strategies used by western landscape painters when arranging the elements of his paintings, his relationship to his country was more than one of aesthetic appreciation, and this was felt around Australia. As Belinda Croft elucidates, 'Albert's Gift' was more far-reaching than simply the tangible legacy of his art, '...more than the sum parts of watercolour paints on paper. It is an essence that resides in the strength of Namatjira's work – his courage, his sorrow, his spirituality – in these days of 'reconciliation', but most of all, in the spiritual heritage of every indigenous person in Australia.'4

1. Alison French, Seeing the Centre: The Art of Albert Namatjira 1902-1959, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2002, p.22
2. G. Yunupingu cited in, Wally Caruana, Windows on the Dreaming, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1989, p.14
3. Philip Jones, The Heritage of Namatjira: The Watercolourists of Central Australia, edited by Jane Hardy, 1992
4. B. Croft in Alison French, Seeing the Centre: The Art of Albert Namatjira 1902-1959, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2002, p. 148