Provenance: The Estate of Sir Sidney Nolan

The Australian landscape was vital to Nolan throughout his career. Not only did his vision of the history, myths and legends of the Australian landscape, completely alter the direction of Australian landscape painting forever, it was the element which preoccupied his entire body of work.

Nolan first visited outback Australia in 1949 and again in 1952 following a commission by the Brisbane Courier Mail to document the drought stricken area of Northern Australia. The resulting paintings and works on paper capture an unusual beauty in the death and desolation of countless animals and thousands of square kilometers of land. Nolan commented that the many animal carcasses littering the desert reminded him of the petrified bodies he had seen in Pompeii, writing that he wanted the works to suggest ‘that life might haunt the varnished bones’. As Nolan explains earlier works such as Carcass (cat. no.15) and Untitled (Carcass) (cat. no.16) were "treated as single objects as if they were extracted from a still life…"1 The dramatic horned skull of the later painting Carcass in Swamp (cat. no.17) underscores Alan McCulloch's comment that the macabre subject of the skeleton offers both the precise lines of architectural study and the soft contours of still life.2 
RM

1 Sidney Nolan quoted in Elwyn Lynn and Sidney Nolan – Australia, Bay Books, Australia, 1979, p.188.
2 McCulloch. A., Herald, Melbourne, 23 June 1953, p.10.