Provenance:
The Estate of Sir Sidney Nolan

Girl with Vase of Flowers c.1942 is a striking portrait in profile with clear Picasso influences. Jane Clark sites Rilke’s poem Flowers 1 (below) in relation to a similar work, Window: Girl and Flowers of the same year. The importance of literature in Nolan’s body of work runs parallel with his image making. As Rosenthal explains, “Books and writers not only furnished his mind, but also inspired many of his most interesting works.”2

1 Clark J., Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and Legends, ICCA, Sydney, 1987, p.41.
2 Rosenthal. T.G., Sidney Nolan, Thames and Hudson, London, 2002, p.221.

Flowers, whose kinship with ordering hands were able
to feel at last (girls’ hands, of once, of today),
who often strewn all over the garden table,
tired and tenderly injured lay
waiting for water to come, yet again redeeming
from death already beginning,–you,
now lifting your heads in the vivifying current
streaming
from feeling fingers, able to do
yet more in the way of kindness than ever you guessed,
light-headed ones, when you woke in the jug, to find
you were cooling and slowly exhaling the warmth of
girls, like things confessed,
like tiring sins remembered in drowsy gloom,
which the gathering of you committed, to bind
you to them once more, who blend with you in their,
bloom.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

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