Sidney Nolan, Western Australia

Sir Sidney Nolan AC OM CBE (1917-1992) was the most original and inventive Australian artist of the postwar decades, and was one of the few Australian artists to have achieved an international reputation in the twentieth century. Beginning his career as a commercial artist in the 1930s, he mounted his first solo exhibition in 1940. After having served as an army storeman in the Wimmera, he became associated with the modernist art patrons John and Sunday Reed at Heide, Victoria. At Heide between 1945 and 1947 he made the enormously complex series of paintings of Ned Kelly for which he is best known. From 1950 Nolan lived abroad, but returned to Australia at regular intervals. He continued to explore Australian themes and landscapes in paintings of Burke and Wills, Eliza Fraser, Gallipoli and the Eureka rebellion, and in his huge masterpiece Riverbend (1965). A major retrospective of Nolan’s work, Sidney Nolan – A New Retrospective, held at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2007, brought together more than 100 of his works.

David Moore (1927–2003) only ever held two exhibitions of portraits: Australian Artists 1960-1985, at the Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne and The Print Room, Sydney in 1986; and David Moore: From Face to Face, at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra in 2000. The Gallery subsequently acquired more than one hundred portrait photographs by gift of Moore, with financial assistance from Timothy Fairfax AC and L Gordon Darling AC CMG.