Lloyd Rees at 90, Northwood, Sydney

Lloyd Rees AC CMG (1895 - 1988), artist, author and teacher, became well known as a young man for his meticulous, almost obsessively detailed, renderings of buildings around Brisbane. During trips to Europe in the 1920s, 1950s, 1960 and 1970s Rees was particularly struck by the countryside of Tuscany. His landscapes, rendered in an unpretentious style combining careful analysis, immediacy and sensuality, won wide recognition in both the public and the art world. Inevitably, his proficiency combined with his longevity to make him the 'grand old man' of Australian art in the 1980s. In 2002 the Art Gallery of New South Wales mounted a large exhibition of Rees's European drawings, based on 19 sketchbooks and a great number of drawings in the gallery's collections.