The jockey and his wife (1953) predates Brack’s sustained exploration of the comédie humain of the Australian racecourse in 1956. That series—encompassing watercolours, drawings and prints—studiously plotted the procedures of horse racing and the patterns of crowd behaviour. Each year, Melbourne’s famed Spring racing carnival brought a determined gaiety to the city: Brack responded with […]
This piece was written for an auction house catalogue for the sale of the Grundy collection of Australian art in 2013. It gave me an opportunity write at length on a painting I’d touched upon briefly elsewhere. It’s funny how the more iconic a painting becomes, the less detailed appraisals of it are. The painting was […]
Having pursued the topic further since this article was first published in 1995, I’d modify some of my comments. The issue of what precisely was meant by ‘national’ in Arthur Streeton’s The national game is still to be resolved but there are strong leads. Contrary to what I state below, ‘national’ could mean ‘geographically expansive’; […]