Was Sunday Reed the hidden hand behind Nolan?

By Susan Wyndham
October 2, 2004

The Trial, 1947, from Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly series.

A biography of the charismatic artists' patron Sunday Reed has stirred the art world, upsetting Sir Sidney Nolan's widow and Charles Blackman's former wife with its claims about her influence.

Adding to the myth of creativity, sexual intrigue and tragedy around Reed, Melbourne art historian Janine Burke says she was not only Nolan's lover and financial supporter in the 1940s but collaborated in his art and helped paint his famous Ned Kelly series.

Burke also speculates in The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide that Blackman's 1950s Alice in Wonderland paintings, known as depictions of blind writer Barbara Blackman, were tributes to Reed.

"She's really getting into deep water and making unnecessary assumptions that she can't prove or disprove," said Lady (Mary) Nolan, the artist's third wife, from her home in Wales.

Barbara Blackman said: "Why would she want to go out on this limb? I think it's a pretty thin limb. Charles never used anybody as his model, but I was around him all the time. I was his Alice. I was his image."

Sunday and her husband, John Reed, attracted artists such as Nolan, Albert Tucker and John Perceval to Heide, their semi-rural property in what is now Bulleen, and were midwives to Australian modernism.

Burke argues that Reed helped Nolan find his style. Their affair ended savagely but under its inspiration he painted his Kelly series on the Heide dining table, sometimes with an arm around her waist.

"I feel there was a transition," said Burke. "She moved at that stage from being the studio assistant who was priming canvases and framing things to painting sections of the work."


As evidence, she shows a watercolour of a woman by Nolan with the dedication, in unidentified handwriting, "For the one who paints such beautiful squares".

Knowing her claim is controversial, Burke said: "It might sound far-fetched at first, but when you examine how closely they were working together you can see it was a very natural outgrowth of that."

She quotes a 1943 letter from Nolan to Reed that refers to her "painting out" part of one of his finished paintings. Even Lady Nolan said Nolan cut a large painting in half after the Reeds told him it was too big.

However, Lady Nolan, part of the Heide circle in the '40s as the artist Mary Boyd, said: "Sunday was certainly a tremendous influence on Sidney, but they didn't work together at all.

Sunday Reed milking, 1942.

"Sidney was a most innately painterly person and nobody was going to take over. The Kellys were nothing to do with Sunday; he had wanted to paint them for a long time."

The owner of Australian Galleries, Stuart Purves, who visited Heide as a child, said: "It was always whispered in the corridors that Sunday was involved in making the occasional mark."



Burke sees Reed in paintings by Blackman such as the 1956 Alice that hangs at Heide. "It looks like her with the big blue eyes, the long face, the blonde hair and the flowers, which was always Sunday's emblem. Nolan painted her with flowers and I think Blackman did, too. She was his earliest and most generous patron."

Blackman, suffering alcoholic dementia at 76, was lucid enough to say, "I don't think like that. Painting has nothing to do with logic. Paintings are visual metaphors that have departed from reality and sprung into an idea."

He heard the Alice in Wonderland story on his wife's talking books. But he said, "As far as Barbara's concerned, it's sight unseen because she's blind." As for Reed, "If you say she transferred herself into the paintings, that's more like it."

Art historian and former NGA director Betty Churcher insists the paintings depict the young Barbara Blackman with sightless eyes. "They're portraits of Barbara. If you miss that, you miss a lot about the paintings."

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