"Morning Sunlight, Edwards Farm"
Watercolour
30x39cm
Signed Lower Left, Dated 35, Titled & Signed verso
Prov: Private Collection Adelaide
$10,000-12,000
Edwards Farm was among the properties surrounding Hahndorf that provided Hans Heysen with subjects throughout his long engagement with the Adelaide Hills. Works such as Morning Light, Edwards Farm form part of a much broader record of the district, as Heysen moved between neighbouring farms, paddocks and roads, painting the great gums alongside the cultivated landscape and the people and animals who worked it. From his home at The Cedars, the countryside around Hahndorf, Woodside and Balhannah provided an extraordinary concentration of subjects that he returned to repeatedly.
The importance of these familiar surroundings to Heysen’s career can be measured by the major paintings they produced. His Hahndorf farming subjects included ploughmen and draught horses, culminating in The Toilers, which won the Wynne Prize in 1920. Other Adelaide Hills landscapes followed, including The Quarry, awarded the Wynne Prize in 1922, and An Afternoon in Autumn in 1924. Heysen would ultimately win the Wynne Prize nine times, establishing him as one of the foremost Australian landscape painters of his generation.
Much of that national reputation was built from the country immediately surrounding his home. Edwards Farm and the neighbouring properties were therefore more than incidental locations; they formed part of the working rural landscape that Heysen observed closely and made central to his art.
