Provenance: The artist, Private collection Sydney

Sidney Nolan was a constant traveller, first within Australia, from which he drew inspiration for his celebrated Central Australia and desert landscapes, and later throughout the world; Africa, Turkey, Greece and New Guinea, to name but a few destinations, offered inspiration for some of his best and most important work. Nolan himself explained 'I didn’t feel Australian. I don’t feel English, etc. I like to feel wherever I land is Planet Earth. I am an Earthling.' 1

From 1955, Nolan and his family settled in London and it was from here that he expanded his already extensive travel experiences. He spent some months on Hydra in Greece in 1956, where the Trojan War and Greek myth became his focus and through which Leda and the Swan and Gallipoli paintings were born.

In 1962-63 Nolan and Cynthia visited Africa, Nolan having been commissioned by a Nigerian businessman who arranged for visits to the National Parks including the Serengeti. Nolan’s African paintings capture the fascination of wilderness and the beauty of the wild with great subtlety and passion.

Nolan was awarded the Australian National University Creative Arts Fellowship in 1965 and travelled to New Guinea as well as Indonesia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nepal. Many of the New Guinea paintings such as New Guinea c.1965 (cat. no. 52, p.76) feature male New Guinea dancers and their rituals. These paintings, it has been suggested may be the source for Nolan’s later monumental work Snake, 1970-72 (The Sidney Nolan Trust) and Snake (Peking Mural), 1973 (University of Western Australia). 2 
RM

1 Interview with Sally Begbie, The Rodd, 1992, quoted in Underhill. N., Nolan on Nolan, p. 288
2 Rosenthal. T.G., Sidney Nolan, Thames and Hudson, London, 2002, p. 205