Dutch peasant, c.1931 – 32
Dorrit Black
oil on cardboard on composition board
75.5 x 63.0 cm
signed lower right: Dorrit Black
Estate of the artist, Adelaide
Thence by descent
Helen Finlayson (née Black), Adelaide, 1951 [the artist's sister]
Margaret Michelmore (née Finlayson), Adelaide, a gift from the above
Estate of the above, Adelaide
Dorrit Black, Modern Art Centre, Sydney, August 1932
Dorrit Black, Royal South Australian Society of Arts, Adelaide, 10 – 21 May 1949, cat. 2
Dorrit Black 1891 – 1951, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, then touring to: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Newcastle Art Gallery, New South Wales; The Ewing and George Paton Galleries, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1975 – 76, cat. 20 (label attached verso, as ‘Dutch Peasant Girl’)
North, I., The Art of Dorrit Black, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, and Macmillan, South Melbourne, 1979, cat. 0.43, pl. 22, pp. 58 (illus.), 59, 122
Topliss, H., Modernism and Feminism, Australian Women Artists 1900 – 1940, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1996, p. 144 (illus.)
Although painted in Sydney, Dutch peasant, c.1931 – 32 harks back to Dorrit Black’s time in Europe during the late 1920s. As well as studying at the Grosvenor School in London and with André Lhote – both in Paris and at his summer school at Mirmande in the south of France – Black travelled widely during her two year European sojourn and the places she visited and the sights she saw offered much rich visual inspiration for her art. Black painted views of the mountainous landscape around Taormina, Sicily, for example, and the dramatic eruption of Mt Etna that she witnessed during her stay there in November 1928 was the subject of a striking later linocut (see lot 7). The present work reflects time spent in the Netherlands in the company of artist-friend Grace Crowley during the summer of 1929, a trip which also gave rise to a series of prints that depict the picturesque fishing village of Veere.
Black must have been pleased with this painting as she included it in the solo exhibition of her work at the Modern Art Centre, Sydney, in August 1932. Painted in a strong colour palette of blue and grey, contrasted with rust and ochres, the image combines shallow pictorial space and the geometric simplification she learnt from Lhote, presenting a portrait that, as Ian North writes, ‘suggests not only [the subject’s] physicality but endurance and even a monumentality.’1 Black combines abstraction of her subject with a focus on details that caught her eye, including the scalloped edge of the figure’s white bonnet and the delicate floral embroidery on her smock. The brushwork is subtle, densely covering the cardboard support but with an emphasis on light and shade throughout which imparts a sense of movement and enlivens the composition. As a contemporary reviewer observed, ‘light has become the actor. Its cubic capacity penetrates the colour and produces charm through the struggle between colour and form.’2
1. North, I., The Art of Dorrit Black, Macmillan Australia & the Art Gallery of South Australia, South Melbourne, 1979, p. 58
2. ‘Art in Sydney’, Christian Science Monitor, 27 August 1932, p. 5, cited in Lock, T., Dorrit Black: unseen forces, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2014, p. 72
KIRSTY GRANT