A Baudelarian painter of modern life, Smart created, from a wealth of real-life observations, a painted world of globally uniform geometric structures populated by anonymous figures engaged in solitary activities. Although painted in Jeffrey Smart’s Tuscan home of Posticcia Nuova, where he spent the last forty years of his life, Second study for morning, Yarragon siding, 1983, and its related works, display through their blue skies and crystalline light an unmistakably Australian setting.

Earlier in 1983, during a trip back to Australia for the launch of his monograph by Peter Quartermaine, Smart had visited the Victorian highlands of the Gippsland area in search of an Australian landscape background for his monumental commission, Container Train in Landscape, 1983 – 84 (Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne), which had originally been based on a view of a Yugoslavian pine forest.¹ While in the rural townships in the picturesque foothills of the Strzelecki Ranges, the artist became captivated by the contrast between the corrugated plane of a railway shed on a platform and the striking rolling hills of the landscape beyond. Like Container Train in Landscape, the resulting Yarragon Siding works are defined by their bold horizontal layering, juxtaposing flat sections of corrugated iron with a detailed natural landscape.

Smart’s overlapping tripartite composition, developed in Second study for Yarragon siding, progresses from lower left to upper right, in a ‘rhythmic passage of visual music.’² The eye travels throughout the composition from the man reading a newspaper in the foreground (curiously standing on the tracks rather than the platform), up to the vertical forms and striations of the middle ground, to finish with a section of airy plein air landscape on the far left, offering respite from the obscuring and containing effect of Smart’s flat and abstract geometry. Even in this preparatory study for the final, larger, easel painting Morning Yarragon Siding, 1983 (formerly in the Holmes à Court collection, Perth) Smart indulges in textural details and patterns. Meticulously painted, Smart’s low-horizon landscape in the corner of Second study recalls the finely detailed representational landscapes included in the backgrounds of Renaissance portraiture, such as those within the diptych portraits of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, 1473 – 75 (Uffizi Gallery, Florence) painted by Piero della Francesca, an artist Smart greatly admired.

The carefully considered final composition of Morning, Yarragon Siding was preceded by a disciplined and sequential process of refinement. Its preparatory works are recorded as First Sketch for Morning, Yarragon Siding; Second Sketch for Morning, Yarragon Siding; Second Study for Morning, Yarragon Siding and Third Study for Morning, Yarragon Siding, and together account for a significant proportion of the total of Smart’s works completed in 1983.³ Second study for Yarragon Siding has been denoted as a study with the artist’s marking system of painted borders – here in a sequence of white, gold and creamy grey. With a quality of detailed completeness, this study is more than a simple aide-memoire, standing alone as a finished work in its own right. The unique artistic choices in Second study that differ from its related works are few, as the arrangement of structures, shadows and key elements of the composition has largely remained the same throughout the studies. In addition to the changing colours of the central group of drums, and various choices of large lettering painted on the side of the corrugated wall, the figure in the foreground appears uniquely in Second study with his head revealed, unobscured by the newspaper, lifted to enjoy the warm morning sunshine as it floods the otherwise deserted station.

1. Pearce, B., Jeffrey Smart, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2005, p. 173
2. ibid., p. 196
3. McDonald, J., Jeffrey Smart. Paintings of the 70s and 80s, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1990, p. 160

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH