Holiday resort

Jeffrey Smart is one of Australia’s most celebrated twentieth-century artists, known for his transformation of the mundane into the extraordinary. His carefully arranged and precisely recorded paintings bring into focus the lines, forms and colours of the modern world. While the artist lived permanently in Italy from 1964, he remained indebted to his formative training in Adelaide where he received private tuition from the modernist Dorrit Black.

Holiday resort, 1946, was created when Smart was just twenty-five years old and

it demonstrates his early recognition that there is great beauty and mystery to be found in the familiar. Despite the evocative sunny title, the painting depicts a bleak coastal view of the popular holiday destination of Port Elliot, on South Australia’s Fleurieu Peninsula. An abandoned pram in the foreground and a solitary figure positioned at a distance suggest an ominous mood and a sense of human isolation. The additional motifs of scattered rocks, coloured party lights and a full moon imply an aftermath of activity or a post-conflict environment. The surreal and unsettling qualities that distinguish this painting became the defining features of Smart’s mature work.

Elle Freak, Associate Curator of Australian Paintings and Sculpture