Born in Hamburg, Germany in 1877 to Maria and Louis Heysen, Hans Heysen and his family moved to Australia in 1884. In 1892, aged fourteen, Hans left school and was apprenticed to a sawmilling and hardware business near Adelaide, buying art materials with his wages and drawing in his spare time. In 1893, he enrolled in James Ashton’s Norwood Art School, where he was identified as an unusually talented pupil. A four-year scholarship in Europe followed, initiating a period of profound artistic growth. Within a year of returning to Australia, he set up his own studio, won the Wynne Prize, and married Selma (Sallie) Bartels.

Hans’s comfort and success in later life were hard-earned: he had overcome the traditional barriers of an aspirant artist lacking funds and connections, and also the burden of anti-German prejudice, which saw him watched by police during the First World War and cost him important professional opportunities. That he was able to regain his place among the most-loved Australian artists of the twentieth century is testament to both the quality of his work and his personal charisma. He won numerous prizes and awards and was knighted in 1959. Hans painted and drew almost until his death in 1968, at the age of ninety.

Born in 1911, the fourth of Sallie and Hans’s eight children, Nora was the only one to pursue an artistic career. Although not formally taught by her father, Nora observed his work, accompanying him on painting trips from an early age. In 1926, at age fourteen, she enrolled at the North Adelaide School of Fine Arts, studying full-time for five years. After selling her first painting in 1930, Nora began painting in a converted shed at the family home and over the next three years her works were acquired by national collections around Australia. From 1934 until 1938 she studied in Europe, developing a looser, more high-keyed style. She then moved to Sydney, which remained her home for the rest of her life.

In 1938 Nora was the first woman to be awarded the Archibald Prize for portraiture and subsequently became the first female official war artist, serving from late 1943 to early 1946. Although Nora fell into obscurity from the 1950s, she continued to paint and draw until her death in 2003 at the age of ninety-two. Hans and Nora Heysen: Two Generations of Australian Art is the most extensive exhibition of her works to date and demonstrates her profound and affecting mingling of sensitivity and strength.

Although his parents had settled in Adelaide, from a young age Hans visited Hahndorf, a small town in the Adelaide Hills that was an important centre of German immigration. Hahndorf’s Lutheran churches, German businesses, brilliant sunshine and abundant nature were at once familiar and seductively exotic. Following their marriage, Hans and Sallie Heysen moved to a rented cottage in Billygoat Lane, Hahndorf. In the same year, an enormously successful Melbourne exhibition of Hans’s work was opened by the prime minister, Alfred Deakin; this was an important milestone for Hans on the path to widespread recognition and financial stability.

In 1912, the year after Nora’s birth, and following another successful Melbourne exhibition, the family purchased The Cedars, an expansive country property in Hahndorf. The house was furnished in the Arts and Crafts style, in keeping with the ‘Truth to Nature’ doctrine that permeated Hans’s, and later Nora’s, art. In England, Hans acquired decorative arts from Morris & Co. and furniture in the style of Liberty and Co. Later, he collected Chinese and Japanese textiles, which featured as backdrops in his still-life painting, as they did in Nora’s. The much-loved home and Hahndorf landscape provided comfort in times of isolation and a secure base from which both artists could branch out with assurance.

In 1899, Hans was awarded an informal scholarship by four Adelaide business owners to study in Europe. In Paris, he studied at the Académie Julien, the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Colarossi before travelling to the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. Hans received instruction of a standard unavailable in Australia; his frames of artistic reference expanded exponentially, and the experience paved the way for an internationalism that would, perhaps paradoxically, infuse his treatment of Australian landscape. Hans later explicitly disavowed concepts of nationalism, asserting that:

‘while as an artist I love Australia, art has no country, but is in essence cosmopolitan’.

Thirty years later Nora underwent a similar evolution. At the end of a nine-month family tour of Germany and the United Kingdom, the Heysens travelled to London to see Nora safely installed. She enrolled at the Central School of Art, studying over the next two years under Bernard Meninsky, James Grant, Alfred Turner and John Skeaping. This was a period of tremendous excitement and evolution. in 1934 she wrote home,

‘I want to paint people, homely interiors, skies and trees and water and all that is living and vibrating around me … I feel freer and surer of myself, and I know what I want’.

Although it was surrounded by farmland and ostensibly suitable for agriculture, the Heysens did not farm their property. Instead, they allowed it to gently return to nature. Hans’s reverence for the natural world permeated his art and his life. He referred to ‘meeting’ trees. He also mourned their loss. In 1937, he wrote to Nora:

‘that lovely old white Gum I have painted so often at Woodside has gone. It felt like losing an old friend’.

This sensibility lends a curious ambivalence to heroic images of rural labour such as Hauling timber, 1911. Accounts of Hans paying local councils the price of the timber to not cut down his favourite eucalypts were widely reported during his lifetime and what was once perceived as an endearing mark of eccentricity is today identifiable as a strong and progressive conservationist impulse. In 1938, Hans increased his family’s land holding to 150 acres in order to extend his environmental protection. He was, in effect, safeguarding his friends:

I had my special trees, and they altered their appearance – the time of year and the angle of the sun made all the difference. You could paint a tree once day and get all its various facets. And the next day it would be a different tree.

Just as Hans’s work exemplified the notion of ‘knowing’ nature through the study of landscape, so Nora knew nature through flowers and people. The garden at The Cedars was planted with exotic species – the monumental Himalayan cedar trees that give the property its name and also fragrant bourbon roses, lilacs, irises and dahlias. Souvenir de la Malmaison roses were a favourite subject of both artists. Flower painting was Nora’s passion – one to which she returned repeatedly and within which she experimented extensively, in her palette, her style and technique. Her early works are meticulous, shadowed, sculptural – as she declared,

‘My nature didn’t lend itself to this quick watercolour painting. I wanted to model things and get things in the round’.

After studying in England, she brightened her palette and adopted a looser style of brushwork.

Although still life never dominated Hans’s art, he was highly accomplished in this genre. His method for still life was different from landscape in that he worked straight from the subject, without making studies or sketches. These paintings include large-scale extravagant arrangements and smaller, more intimate flower studies. Many were painted as gifts for friends and family, featuring flowers and vegetables grown at The Cedars.

As students, both Nora and Hans trained in portraiture and figure-drawing, and while both artists demonstrated proficiency, it was Nora who was to make her name as an intuitive and original portraitist.

Shortly after arriving in Sydney in 1938, Nora met the Netherlands’ consul and his wife, Madame Elink Schuurman, whose portrait she painted and entered in the prestigious Archibald Prize. Much of the reporting surrounding Nora’s win focused upon her lineage, and her gender. ‘Now 28 years of age’, wrote the Maitland Daily Mercury critic, ‘she has been painting for 13 years under the tuition of her father’. In truth, Nora had been living away from her family for six years, and she was never formally under Hans’s tuition. Nora was a skilled and imaginative artist, yet she remained troubled by the possibility that her reputation might be dependent upon her father’s, declaring in 1962,

‘I don’t know if I exist in my own right’.

Some of her purpose, it seems, in focusing upon portraiture, and in moving to Sydney, was to escape the inevitability of familial association.

Following her Archibald win, Nora received many important commissions and several more prizes, positioning her among the most respected portraitists of the period, and resulting in her appointment, in 1943, as Australia’s first female war artist.

When war was declared in 1939, Nora wrote home of her frustration at her powerlessness in the face of such destruction. In 1943, the possibility of becoming the first female war artist emerged, and she expressed immediate enthusiasm. Predictably, she was treated differently from her male counterparts, and was assigned to document medical and research units at various locations around Australia and subsequently in New Guinea.

Nora’s war portraiture bears all the marks of her great sensitivity as an artist and humanist, and arguably little in the way of explicit patriotism. She harboured no illusions about the glories of battle – three years earlier she had declared her ‘bitter resentment against the futility and the horror of war’. Her drawings of invalids and hospital patients are among her most delicate and sensitive from this period, demonstrating her emotional connection to her subjects, as well as her technical facility as a draftsperson.

Working in the tropical humidity presented numerous challenges, leading Nora to observe with her characteristic dry humour:

‘My paintings mildew overnight, they’ll be old masters before I get them back’.

Her skin also suffered badly in these conditions, and in 1946 she returned to Australia to recover.

The paintings and drawings produced by Nora during her time as a war artist were acquired by The Australian War Memorial, Canberra, which has generously loaned these works to the exhibition.

In 1926, following the trauma of the First World War and the sudden, tragic death of his daughter Lilian, Hans ventured for the first time to the Flinders Ranges. There was something he found personally therapeutic in his approach to this landscape. Over the next twenty-three years, he would return ten times, mainly to the Aroona and Arkaba areas, making numerous sketches and watercolours, some of which were later developed into oils. In this ancient place of monumental rocks and trees scarred by time and drought, Hans found, it seems, a kind of comfort in the rough continuity of nature.

It was during this time that he discovered a new palette – the gentle modulations of his Hahndorf landscapes were replaced with greater contrasts. There is a harshness to these works, but also a brilliance and intensity that suggests the stark juxtapositions of the environment itself. Hans admired Vincent van Gogh – ‘the great originator of modern art, who towers above them all’ – and his influence, as well as that of other Post-impressionists, including Paul Cézanne, is manifest in the Flinders landscapes. Particularly striking are the effects of geometric simplification; in Hans’s words,

‘the beautiful balance of the pyramid and the circle’.