About this work
Following studies in the United Kingdom and Switzerland, Ian Fairweather served as a Lieutenant in the First World War, where he was imprisoned and detained in a German POW camp. After his release in 1818, he commenced studies at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. During the 1930s and 1940s Fairweather travelled the world extensively, living a nomadic life. He was often living in poverty as he painted in the different cities and islands he visited – Shanghai, Peking, Bali, the Philippines and Melbourne. The last part of his life he spent in a hut that he built on Bribie Island, Queensland. En route from Melbourne to Shanghai in 1934, Fairweather landed at Davao on Mindanao Island in the Philippines and lived there for more than three months.