Morning Break
Sir Hans Heysen
Details
- Artist
- Sir Hans Heysen
- Title
- Morning Break
- Year
- 1922
- Medium
- watercolour on paper
- Size
- 66 x 56 cm
- Details
signed lower right: HANS HEYSEN
copyright courtesy C. Heysen
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Provenance
unknown
Fine Australian Paintings, Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 19 August 1991, lot 345
private collection, Melbourne
Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 2003
private collection, Melbourne
Exhibited
The Seasons in Australian Art, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 20 Nov – 18 Dec 1999 and touring, cat. no. 39
Annual Collectors’ Exhibition 2003, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 6 Sep – 5 Oct 2003, cat. no. 11
Further Information
Hans Heysen was one of Australia’s foremost landscape painters in the period between the two world wars, depicting the landscape around Hahndorf and the Mount Lofty Ranges in South Australia. He was championed by artists such as Lionel Lindsay describing him as Australia’s version of the Barbizon School, whose work Heysen had encountered in Paris during his schooling. In the work of Theodore Rousseau and others, he noted the pantheistic depiction of nature and the elevation of mood in painting through the use of light to transform natural elements, such as trees, to heroic proportions.
In Morning Break, we have Heysen’s well known motif of twin gum trees displayed against the sky, and everything in this watercolour exists to sing the nobility of the ghost gums. The morning light shining through the trees on the right hand side of the tree trunks may be adapted from the Barbizon School formula of contrasting the two trees, one is already in shadow while the other glows in regal glory. The diminutive horses and human figure serve to anchor the composition, however the true drama here is the giant ghost gum etched against the sky.”
Helen Topliss, 2003