Siesta

Siesta

(1952) Darling Point, Sydney

oil on canvas

102.5 x 127.5 cm

inscribed in brown paint u.l.: Russell Drysdale

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Purchased, 1953

Drysdale's magnum opus 'Siesta' for all its impressive size, its fine colour, and its sense of space, its heat and exhausted quietude, is finally a work of literature in which the tensions of a painter's sensibility are dissipated by his descriptive preoccupations.
(Paul Haefliger, 'Christmas art exhibition', Sydney Morning Herald, 10 December 1952, p. 2)

The sleeping figure in the outback Queensland landscape shown in Siesta is a unique image in Drysdale's paintings. The monumental, bare-footed, recumbent figure pressed up to the front of the picture plane, evokes a sense of peacefulness and serenity. Siesta offers a summation of some of the artist's concerns, combining the figure and the architecture, light and landscape of the Australian outback.

Purchased by the Commonwealth Government in 1953 and forming part of the national collection, Siesta remains a relatively unknown work by Drysdale. It has not been included in any major exhibition since 1952 and has, to the author's knowledge, never been reproduced.