Ian FAIRWEATHER

Scottish 1891–1974
worked in China 1929–36, throughout Asia 1933–43, Australia 1934–74

Two Philippine children, 1935, is a rarity, as well under one hundred pictures exist or survive from the artist’s early maturity. The painting was exhibited twice, once at the Redfern Gallery, London, in 1936 in an exhibition shared with one of London’s established post-impressionist painters, Walter Sickert, and again at the National Gallery, London, in an exhibition organised in 1940 and titled British Painting Since Whistler. By then paintings in the National Gallery collection were stored out of London, safe from German bombing raids, and the gallery held concerts and exhibitions like this for the residents of London. Ian Fairweather was regarded as a modern artist with great potential. A critic wrote in Apollo in 1937: ‘Fairweather if he continues as he has begun will develop into a star of the first magnitude’. Ian Fairweather studied at the Slade School of Art, London, and his talent and his social isolation attracted a long-standing friendship by Henry Tonks, the Slade Professor of Art. Fairweather was a traveller, often living in poverty as he painted in exotic cities and islands—Shanghai, Peking, Bali, the Philippines and Melbourne. The last part of his life he spent in a hut he built on Bribie Island, Queensland. En route from Melbourne to Shanghai in 1934, Fairweather landed at Davao on Mindinao Island in the Philippines, living there for over three months until he continued to Shanghai in early December. In Davao he rented a house on stilts on the edge of the beach and commented: ‘Underneath my house there are boats, babies, sand, pigs—chickens’. The artist paints in a post-impressionist style—in Melbourne he had for the first time met ardent Cézannists in the artists William Frater, Arnold Shore and George Bell—and, as Cézanne left his canvas bare, he too leaves the surface of the plywood support bare in places. In a style which comes from Cézanne and the Impressionists, form is built up in parallel brush strokes. Murray Bail, in his monograph Ian Fairweather, 1981, writes that the artist was in bad health in Davao and stressed. The large black eyes are prominent in the composition, and Fairweather wrote to his mentor, Jim Ede, that he felt he was being mocked by the village boys.

Jennifer Phipps