Drysdale’s The Chinaman’s Store, 1949

I was recently back in Adelaide for the Writers’ Week and some meetings and took the opportunity once again to visit the marvellous Carrick Hill, a gorgeous 1930s period home in South Australia. Lovely as it is the real reason Carrick Hill is a treasure house is its art collection. Among the collection there are any number of Stanley Spencer’s, Jacob Epstein’s, Augustus Johns, not to mention a Gaugin, Vuillard and Boudins. Along with the Europeans there is a good collection of Australian artists less familiar to me.  On both trips there that I have made one picture has stood out as amazingly impressive and I thought I’d share it as it is called The Chinaman’s Store painted in 1949 by Russell Drysdale. It sits in the dining room in a prominent place and so must have been precious to the owners too. I’m afraid this is the best version of it I have found online and it gives no hint of the beautiful colours or the sense (as several of us looking at it agreed) of a South Australian Edward Hopper painting…here’s a bit on the painting:

THE CHINAMAN’S STORE, 1949, is also a close study of the character of a vulnerable Australian country town – a simply built but solidly enduring place in a desolate, spacious and harsh landscape.

In this painting, unlike his usual “figure in the landscape” works, Drysdale has omitted any reference to the town’s inhabitants; the buildings must also stand as a reflection of the character of the people. However, this feature also serves to heighten the sense of desolation and desertion. The composition is simple: the store stands in the right-hand foreground opposite a nondescript wooden house, and in the background are several other houses and distant hills.

What might otherwise be an uninteresting scene is relieved by the richness of Drysdale’s colours. The various shades of brown, yellow and red, reminiscent of the colours of Venetian painting, characterise the “essence” of the land, and these are placed against a bright blue sky which serves to give a sense of the heat of the day. Patches of green grass hug the store’s verandah floor, softening the raw adjacent dusty thoroughfare.

Drysdale has no intention of hiding the ugliness of the scene, but presents it with authenticity and dignity. This is not the promised Utopia, but an exhausted, precarious landscape, in which the ghosts of defeated inhabitants linger on.

Adding to the feeling of unease and eeriness in this melancholy settlement, the dry road peters out into the infinity of a countryside which although invaded has not been subdued.