"Glen Helen Gorge, Towards Mount Sonder"
Watercolour
26x37cm
Signed Lower Right
Prov: Gordon Simpson Collection.
Purchased directly from the artist.
$40,000-50,000
About Gordon Simpson: Gordon Simpson was a supervising technical postmaster general department Alice Springs, member Arunta Arts Council. He was a pivotal figure in promoting the Hermannsburg School of Artists at its earliest period.
Gordon Simpson provides an important link between the present work and the early collecting of the Hermannsburg watercolourists in Alice Springs. Simpson worked for the Postmaster-General’s Department in Alice Springs from 1939 for approximately fifteen years and during this period assembled a collection of paintings by artists of the Hermannsburg School. Rex Battarbee, Albert Namatjira’s friend, teacher and advocate, regularly displayed works by the Hermannsburg artists outside Griffiths House on Friday evenings, where Simpson was among the local residents who purchased paintings. In 1968 Simpson organised an exhibition at Hahndorf Gallery in South Australia, believed to have included works from the collection he had assembled during his years in Central Australia.
The subject of the present watercolour, Glen Helen in the West MacDonnell Ranges, was one to which Namatjira returned repeatedly throughout his career. The area also held a deeper connection for the artist, with his father’s Country extending towards Mount Sonder and Glen Helen Gorge. Its rugged ranges, riverbeds and distinctive vegetation provided Namatjira with subjects ideally suited to the transparent colour, carefully observed detail and remarkable sense of distance that characterised his watercolours.
With its provenance to Gordon Simpson, a contemporary Alice Springs collector of the Hermannsburg artists, and its depiction of a landscape closely associated with Namatjira and
his family Country, Glen Helen, MacDonnell Ranges retains a particularly strong connection to the people, place and period from which the Hermannsburg School emerged.
