Roland Wakelin

(1887-1971)

House on Berry's Bay, 1936

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Mr John D. Moore, Sydney
thence by descent
Private collection, New South Wales

EXHIBITED
possibly, Roland Wakelin, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 2 - 14 November 1936, cat. 28, as Berry's Bay

The 1930s were a pivotal decade for Roland Wakelin. In 1934 he was elected a member of the Society of Artists and the following year, he staged his first commercially successful exhibition with Macquarie Galleries. His work had begun to shift in style, with the 1935 exhibition noticeably different from his earlier works. Referring to the new manner, the Sydney Morning Herald's critic noted ' . . a growing delicacy and mellowness of expression. The Cézanne-like period seems to have passed its zenith, giving place to passages of pure lyricism which point to the ascendancy of other stars.'1 From the exhibition, the Art Gallery of New South Wales acquired Mount Wellington, Tasmania, a landscape similar in scope and scale. By 1938, his work was included in a major survey of 150 years of Australian art and in 1942, he was the subject of a retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

This new, gentler mode observed in the 1935 exhibition was to carry Wakelin through the next thirty years of his practice. He continued to focus on landscapes, revisiting the harbour and most particularly, Berry's Bay, with the occasional interior and some portraits. As James Gleeson noted, 'For all his interest in theory and ideas, Wakelin never wandered very far from the visual facts. Unlike many who found inspiration in Cézanne, he was never tempted to take the steps that would lead to complete abstraction. Instead he used the discoveries of the master to draw him closer to the realities of natural form and it is in the work from 1934 onwards, when all earlier influences had been assimilated, that the essential Wakelin emerged.'2

1. Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 2 June 1935, p. 4
2. James Gleeson, 'Tribute to a Pioneer', Sun, Sydney, 5 April 1967, p. 36