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Details
- Place where the work was made
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Harkaway
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Victoria
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Australia
- Date
- 1929
- Media category
- Materials used
- etching, printed in brown ink on paper with plate tone
- Edition
- 3/25
- Dimensions
- 13.0 x 20.5 cm platemark
- Signature & date
Signed and dated l.r., pencil "J C A Traill 1929".
- Credit
- Purchased with support of the Art Gallery Society of New South Wales through the Lorraine Margaret McDermott Bequest 2023
- Location
- Not on display
- Accession number
- 135.2023
- Copyright
- © Estate of Jessie Traill/Copyright Agency
- Artist information
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Jessie Traill
Works in the collection
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About
Jessie Traill, one of the most celebrated Australian etchers of the early 20th century, is best known for her dreamy landscapes and her celebrated series that charts the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
This rare etching depicts tea trees – one of her favourite subjects, and the subject of another important etching (Ti-tree frieze 1910) in the Art Gallery’s collection. An exhibition label that came with this print was annotated ‘Harkaway’, referring to the property in outer Melbourne owned by the artist and her sister between 1913 and 1967, and which is now a public park in her name.
Traill has imbued her tea trees with a fantastical, rhythmic quality that is suggestive of their movement in the wind, but also of other-worldly forces. While the viewer’s eye is offered a route through the tangled boughs towards the light beyond, the path seems ominous, even suffocating.
