Drawing was a medium of fundamental importance to Fred Williams, one that he remained committed to throughout his career. In 1976, towards the end of his life, he wrote in his diary: ‘I have always looked on drawing as the final critical analysis of any artist’s work. … a pencil and paper tells you a whole lot … drawing exposes all. Certainly true of me.’
This exhibition is the first to focus on Williams’s London years (1952–56) and specifically on the drawings of this period. It presents drawings that Williams made in London’s music halls, on the streets of London, at the zoo and in formal life drawing classes. These reveal a side to Fred Williams’s art that is less familiar to the public. Celebrated as one of the most significant Australian landscape painters of the twentieth century, the London drawings reveal his early aspirations to be a figure painter. They also show the rapid development of his art during these intense, formative years and his extraordinary abilities as a draughtsman.
Williams arrived in London in January 1952 and spent the next five years expanding his artistic horizons by studying London’s great collections of historical and contemporary art. He had already spent eight years training to be an artist in Melbourne, studying at the National Gallery School and the George Bell School, and attending various informal life drawing classes in the city. He had received thorough training in drawing, and it was as a draughtsman that Williams first gained public recognition. In 1947 he was awarded the drawing prize in the Victorian Artists’ Society exhibition, and a drawing acquired by the NGV in 1949 was his first work to enter a public collection. This purchase marks the beginning of the Gallery’s long association with the artist.
The city of London provided Williams with new subject matter, and he turned to observing people in particular: performers at the city’s music halls, workers and passersby in the street, models in life drawing classes at the Chelsea Polytechnic, and artist friends and fellow students. A special focus of the exhibition is the sequence of music hall drawings which Williams made in various theatres, sitting at the front of the gods, typically the most affordable seats in the theatre, where he had an unimpeded view and enough light to draw. He sketched jugglers, acrobats, singers and dancers in drawings characterised by extraordinary energy and graphic economy. Williams was also interested in the audience and their reactions, with numerous drawings focusing on absorbed spectators. These range from amusing caricatures to sensitive studies of audience members dimly illuminated in the gloom of the auditorium.
Williams also captured the city of London in on-the-spot drawings of his immediate surroundings – the buildings near his flat in South Kensington, the workroom of the framing shop in which he worked, and the embankment of the River Thames, where he regularly walked. The barges and their inhabitants in the Paddington Canal, people walking their dogs on city streets, or workers humping coal, jockeys and street sellers are all recorded in quick-fire drawings that provide fascinating insight into postwar London. Williams also attended life drawing classes several evenings a week at the Chelsea Polytechnic’s School of Art, where he worked at developing his representation of the human form. These and the large group of drawings of zoo animals, which show Williams’s skill in drawing moving subjects, are other highlights of the exhibition.
Williams also started making etchings for the first time in London, attending the Central School of Art briefly in 1954 to learn the basics of the technique. Over the next few years, he made more than one hundred etchings and the medium quickly became a major art form for him. He often used his drawings as the basis for his etchings, and many of the London genre scenes and music hall drawings were turned into etchings. In addition to the 160 drawings, the exhibition includes a small group of etchings and related gouaches that reveal the artist’s working processes and his exploration of specific motifs across different media.
The National Gallery of Victoria is especially indebted to Lyn Williams AM and Family, who have donated the drawings that form the focus of this exhibition. This recent donation builds upon a history of generous philanthropy that has established a complete collection of Williams’s prints at the NGV, in accordance with the artist’s wishes. This definitive collection of every state and variant impression of Williams’s prints has now been richly extended by a major body of drawings made by the artist in Melbourne in the late 1940s and London in the 1950s. These provide fascinating insight into the career and development of one of Australia’s most significant artists.
Cathy Leahy is NGV Senior Curator, Prints Drawings. The NGV warmly thanks Lyn Williams AM for her generous support.
This article first appeared in the September–October 2022 issue of NGV Magazine.