George Russell Drysdale was born in Bognar Regis, England, on 7 February
1912. He visited Australia as a child before his family settled
permanently in Victoria in 1923. In 1929 he developed a detached retina
in his left eye, a condition that left him almost blind in that eye.
Drysdale began his working life as a jackeroo, however an interest in
art led him to study under George Bell in 1931 and from 1935 to 1938,
and later at the Grosvenor School, London, and Le Grand Chaumiere,
Paris. In 1933 Drysdale married Elizabeth Stephen. He held his first
solo exhibition in Melbourne in 1938, and moved to Sydney in 1940. The
following year's purchase of a painting by the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York, was his first work to enter a public collection.
Self portrait with Donald Friend, Albury 1942
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Self portrait, Selborne Road c.1939
Drysdale
held his inaugural solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, London,
in 1950. The Tate Gallery's purchase represented the first painting by a
modern Australian artist to enter their collection.
Throughout the
1950s, Drysdale travelled to the more remote areas of northern, central
and western Australia. In 1960 a large retrospective exhibition was held
at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and in 1964 Geoffrey Dutton's
Russell Drysdale was published by Thames and Hudson.
Drysdale was
knighted for his services to art in 1969, and was awarded Companion of
the Order of Australia (AC) in 1980. Russell Drysdale died in Sydney on
29 June 1981. In 1997 the National Gallery of Victoria organised the
exhibition Russell Drysdale 1912-81, which toured nationally.
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