Upon returning to Australia in late 1956 after five years in London, Fred Williams saw the landscape of his own country through new eyes. Recognising that the landscape was both part of a longstanding and respected tradition and yet ripe for new interpretation, he decided to make it the primary focus of his mature artistic practice. Painted soon after his return to Australia, The Nattai River reflects Williams’s debt to the Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, whose manipulation of pictorial space provided an important ongoing influence.