Lot 49: IVOR HELE 1912-1993 COASTAL LANDSCAPE, PORT WILLUNGA, SOUTH AUSTRALIA

Oil on composition board Signed and dated indistinctly lower left
Provenance Artlovers Gallery, Artamon, Sydney (label on the reverse); purchaded by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited, 15 July 1983; transfered to Elders IXL in 1985 Portrait of Australia Collection, Foster's Group Limited Exhibited Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 March - 1 April 1984, cat. 50, illus. Portrait of Australia: The Elders IXL Collection, national tour, 1985-1988, cat. 32, illus. The Painted Coast, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1998 Reference Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 57, cat. 50, illus. Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 48-49, illus. pl. 32 South Australian-born, and trained under James Ashton, Sir Ivor Hele, OBE, became renowned as a portrait and landscape painter and Australia's longest-serving war artist. He continued his studies in Paris and Munich before returning to Australia. During the Second World War he was appointed an official war artist, whilst serving first as a private soldier and then a Captain with the 9th Division in the Middle East; then in North Africa and New Guinea. In 1952 he left his home in Aldinga to serve as official artist to the Australian forces in Korea. Hele was knighted in 1983 and died in Adelaide at the age of 81. Coastal landscape, Port Willunga dates from the 1950s, when Hele won the Archibald Prize five times in seven years. The rugged Aldinga coastline and the Willunga Hills - expansive and pristine - were his favourite landscape painting locale, an escape from the ugliness of war. With its protective reef shelf to the south and a broad bay on Gulf St Vincent, the white sandy beach contrasts dramatically with the ochre hilltops. In 1952 he told a reporter that he went surfing every morning.(1) Hele portrays the landscape as though untouched since the time of the Kuarna Aboriginal people, whose ancestor Tjilbruke wept tears here in the Dreaming, creating fresh water springs up the broad and sandy beach. He had paused on a mournful journey down the coast to Cape Jervis, carrying his murdered nephew's body.(2) (1) The News, Adelaide, 4 February 1952, p. 11. (2) See Geoffrey H. Manning, The Tragic Shore: the wreck of the Star of Greece and a history of the jetties of Port Willunga, National Trust of SA, Willunga Branch, 1988. Willunga, about 50 km south of Adelaide on the central Fleurieu Peninsula, is now a very popular beach resort.

59.8 by 121 cm