Remembering Australian Masterpieces: Ian Fairweather

‘Roi soleil’ (1957)

Fairweather is greatly influenced by Oriental art: perhaps more than any other Australian artist of his time. Long periods spent in China, Korea, India and the Pacific Islands have given him a far from superficial knowledge of eastern modes of seeing, and of calligraphic brushwork. Most of Fairweather’s works are in gouache on cardboard grounds, in his composition ‘Roi soleil’ an Eastern deity is gesticulating from his throne through a cubist screen.