SUNLIT GUMS, HAHNDORF, 1951
HANS HEYSEN
watercolour on paper on card
33.0 x 42.0 cm
signed and dated lower left: HANS HEYSEN / 1951
signed verso: Hans Heysen
Private collection
Elder Fine Art, Adelaide, 7 August 2005, lot 62
Private collection, Adelaide
We are grateful to Brenda Martin Thomas, wife of the late David Thomas AM, for kindly allowing us to reproduce David's writing in this catalogue entry.
Hans Heysen and the village of Hahndorf in the Adelaide Hills are almost synonymous. The picturesque Hahndorf near Mt Barker in the Adelaide Hills was named after Captain Dirk Hahn of the ship Zebra, which brought out the Prussian Lutheran families who settled there in 1839. During the First World War the South Australian Government changed many of the German place names, Hahndorf becoming Ambleside, after a town in northwest England. It remained so until 1930. Heysen used both names in his numerous watercolours and oil paintings of the area. Heysen and his wife Sallie moved to Hahndorf in 1908. They lived in rented accommodation before buying the nearby property ‘The Cedars’ in 1912. It was to be his home for over fifty years.
Heysen rejoiced in the beauty of the area, painting it throughout the changing seasons and times of day – of mists or the brightness of spring, early morning light and the hazy heat of midday, to the gentle light of day’s end. The constant throughout his art was the noble gum. As the artist wrote:
‘The subtlety of the tree combined with the beauty; the bulk, the solidity of the tree, and the character of its growth... It's wonderful just to watch the combination of characters; sometimes you get a group of gums and you see how they combine, grow into interesting shapes, and suggest various things, ...I had my special trees, and they altered their appearance - the time of the year and the angle of the sun made all the difference. You could paint a tree one day and get all its various facets. And the next day it would be a different tree...’1
Painted in the Hahndorf landscape surrounding ‘The Cedars’, Sunlit Gums, Hahndorf,1951 captures this iconic motif of the gums, bathed in the bright light of the midday sun. Redolent with the serenity Heysen found here, and gently reigned over by the grandeur of the ancient trees, it is a lyrical vision of nature in all her plenitude, painted in a golden period in Heysen’s art.
1. Thiele, C., Heysen of Hahndorf , David Heysen productions, Adelaide, 2001, p. 147
DAVID THOMAS