YOUTH, DEATH AND THE MAIDEN, 1949
DONALD FRIEND
ink and wash on paper
47.0 x 30.0 cm
signed, dated and inscribed lower left: Donald. '49. / Firenze.
Retrospective Exhibition to Celebrate his Sixtieth Year as an Artist, Holdsworth Galleries, Sydney, 18 March – 26 April 1975, cat. 37
Donald Friend Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 9 February – 25 March 1990; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 14 April – 6 June 1990; and Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 26 June – 19 August 1990 (label attached verso)
Hughes, R., Donald Friend, Edwards and Shaw, Sydney, 1965, p. 63 (illus.)
Pearce, B., Donald Friend, 1915–1989: Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1990, cat. 43, p. 65 (illus.)
Britain, I. (ed.), The Donald Friend Diaries, Chronicles and Confessions of an Australian Artist, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2010, p. 201 (illus.)
The influences and pressures which crowd on a painter's first visit to Italy are so numerous that it is impossible to single them out with much chance of accuracy. What seized Friend was the total environment, a steam-bath of art, where the cinema round the corner from his flat in Florence had faded Ucello frescoes, and he picked up his models cavorting on a sand-bar in the river beneath the magnificent church of the Carmine. But under the influence of Donatello, whose work he closely studied in Florence, Friend's drawings of the nude developed spectacularly: Youth, Death and the Maiden, 1949, is to my mind the most perfect and compressed image of the nude ever drawn by an Australian artist, and certainly one of the dozen finest works of Friend's career.1
1. Hughes, R., Donald Friend, Edwards and Shaw, Sydney, 1965, p. 62