Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings are among the most important of his entire body of work. Painting the first of his Kelly series in 1946-47 (National Gallery of Australia), Nolan returned to the Kelly figure many times and it is the 1950s Kelly paintings in particular which establish ' a new magic and imaginative power.'(1) In these later Kelly paintings the 'naive' style of the 1940s kelly series has been replaced by a more human, emotional intensity.

In Kelly 1959 Nolan combines the heroic image of Ned Kelly with the classical image of martyrdom. This work highlights Nolan's interest in the mythic and uniquely Australian Kelly saga as a story which parallels classical legend. 

Painted whilst Nolan was in New York on a Harkness Fellowship, Kelly 1959 is executed in polyvinyl acetate (the medium used for the Leda and the Swan series also painted at this time) which Nolan scraped across the board in multiple transparent layers of luminous and varied colour.

Nolan had a personal connection to the Ned Kelly identity. As he once explained, 'Most of us have heard it, in one way or another, during our childhood... It is a story arising out of the bush and ending in the bush.'(2) Nolan's own grandfather was a police officer involved with the apprehension of the Kelly Gang and in 1944 Nolan went absent without leave from the army and was himself on the wrong side of the law.

As Robert Melville explained, Kelly had been so established in these later works as a personage and pictorial presence, as to belong 'to the company of the twentieth century personages which includes Picasso's minotaur, de Chirico's mannequins, Ernst's birdmen, Bacon's Pope and Giacometti's walking men.'(3)

(1) Clark. J., Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and legends, ICCA, Sydney, 1987, pp.120-21
(2) The Australian Artist, 4 July, 1948
(3) Quoted in Lynn. E, Sidney Nolan: Myth and Imagery, Macmillan, London and Sydney 1967, p.23