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| Image | Last Sale Date | Title | Edition No. | Last Sale | Last Sale Auction House | Last Sale Location | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 28, 2023 | The Vanity of Human Wishes | Bonhams | Sydney | ||||
paintings
122 x 153.3 cm (48.03 x 60.35 in)
oil on canvas
initialled lower right: "N" signed, dated and inscribed verso: "10 Jan 1966 / N / Nolan / 10 Jan 1966 / Juvenal - Lowell / Hamillus"
Waddington Galleries, London (label attached verso)
Mr Harry Oviss, Melbourne
The Estate of the Late Harry Oviss, Melbourne
Smith and Singer, Sydney, 12 April 2022, lot 10
Private collection, Sydney
Waddington Galleries, London (label attached verso)
RELATED WORKS
The Vanity of Human Wishes , 1966, oil on canvas, three panels, in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Inferno , 1966, oil on canvas, nine panels, on loan to the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, see T.G. Rosenthal, Sidney Nolan, Thames and Hudson, London, 2002, pp. 234-237 (illus.)
"Living and working at the Chelsea Hotel, New York, in the first half of 1966, Nolan was fired with an intense burst of creative energy. He Became a close friend of Robert Lowell - by general critical consensus, the best American poet of his generation. Lowell"s poetry, like Nolan"s painting, "draws habitually from the inexhaustible theatre of many mythologies... as well as modern life". The two men met frequently, preparing illustrated editions of the poet"s work. Many paintings came of this fruitful collaboration, described in Time as "an oratorio streaked with images of visceral intensity". Patrick McCaughey has recently admired "the chilling sexual acrobatics" of The Vanity of Human Wishes , a triptych of canvases inspired by Lowell"s Satires of Juvenal and now in the Art Gallery of South Australia."1
1. Jane Clark, Sidney Nolan - Landscapes and Legends: A Retrospective Exhibition 1937-1987 , International Cultural Corporation of Australia, Sydney, 1987, p. 152
Sidney Nolan (1917-1992)
The Vanity of Human Wishes, 1966
initialled lower right: "N"
signed, dated and inscribed verso: "10 Jan 1966 / N / Nolan / 10 Jan 1966 / Juvenal - Lowell / Hamillus"
oil on canvas
122.0 x 153.3cm (48 1/16 x 60 3/8in).
