Sidney Nolan was born on 22 April 1917 in the suburb of Carlton, Melbourne, Australia. His family were Irish in origin. He attended the Brighton Road State School and then Brighton Technical School and left school aged 14. He enrolled at the Prahan Technical College, Department of Design and Crafts, in a course which he had already begun part-time by correspondence. From 1933, at the age of 16, he began almost six years of work for Fayrefield Hats, Abbotsford, producing advertising and display stands with spray paints and dyes. From 1934, he attended night classes sporadically at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School. He was a close friend of the arts patrons John and Sunday Reed. In 1938, he met and married his first wife Elizabeth, but that marriage soon broke up, because of his increasing involvement with the Reeds. In 1940 Nolan was commissioned to design Serge Lifar’s Icare for the Ballet Russe’s tour of Australia. One reviewer wrote: ‘The much discussed scenery consists of a red and blue drop in the middle of which was a black scrawl, a simplicity in which only the extremely ‘arty’ can see any significance.’ Nolan deserted from the army during the Second World War and lived for some time at the Reed home, ‘Heide’ outside Melbourne (now the Heide Museum of Modern Art). There, he painted the first canvasses in his famous ‘Ned Kelly’ series, reportedly with input from Sunday Reed. Nolan also conducted an affair with Sunday Reed at that time, although he married John Reed’s sister, Cynthia in 1948, after Sunday refused to leave her husband and marry him. Nolan joined that grouping of Australian painters known as ‘the Angry Penguins’. Nolan left his 1946-47 series of 27 Ned Kellys at ‘Heide’, when he left under somewhat emotionally-charged circumstances. He travelled throughout Australia, working on several remarkable sequences of paintings, the most notable of which depicted the remarkable landscape of the interior. Nolan arrived in London in 1951. He began to travel extensively in Europe and in 1956 he moved to Greece, where he spent a year painting themes derived from Greek Mythology. He also spent time at Atelier 17 in Paris, studying engraving and lithography with Stanley Hayter. Nolan was awarded a Harkness Fellowship in 1958 to study in the USA. During the two years he spent there, he formed a close friendship with the American poet Robert Lowell and illustrated several books for him. Nolan never relied upon one style or technique, but rather experimented throughout his lifetime with many different methods of application, and also devised some of his own. Nolan was inspired by children’s art and modernist painting of the early 20th century. In England, Nolan became a regular visitor to the Aldeburgh Festival (then in its formative years) and developed a strong relationship with Benjamin Britten, exhibiting paintings inspired by Britten’s works in the festival exhibitions. In 1973 Faber Music published a fine limited facsimile edition of the original score of Britten’s music for Berthold Brecht’s Children’s Crusade illustrated by Nolan. His wanderlust was insatiable and took him beyond Europe to Africa, China and Antartica. He painted many remarkable series of works inspired by those vast continents. However, his affection for Australia never diminished and he returned for a few months of every year. In the summer of 1983, Nolan settled on the borders of Wales and expressed the sense of belonging once again to a landscape of great magnitude quoting a line he had written in his youth, ‘All was static and monumental with the first of the dawn.’ At 60, he felt compelled to devote himself again to the ideas that had preoccupied him as a young man, and began producing paintings relating to those abstract themes. In 1978, he married Mary Boyd, a member of the Boyd artistic family and the former wife of John Perceval. Nolan was knighted in 1981 and appointed by The Queen to the Order of Merit in 1983. He was appointed Companion of the Order of Australia and elected an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was elected ARA in 1987 and RA in 1991. Major retrospectives of Nolan’s work were held in Sydney in 1967, in Melbourne in both 1987 and 1992, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1957 and in Dublin at the Royal Dublin Society in 1973. Important exhibitions of his early work were held at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1962 and in 1994 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Australian Government named a gallery in Canberra after him. Sir Sidney died in London on 27 November 1992. Website at www.sidneynolantrust.org/pages/index.php