In 1945, Australia’s most famous artist, Sir Sidney Nolan, painted Rosa Mutabilis. Beneath a wide, blue sky and inside a large, abstracted green garden stands a single bush of white roses, from which emerges a young woman. Intertwined with the flowers, she appears to belong to this idyllic realm. In truth, it belonged to her, as did the white house, visible in the distance.
The figure in this picture is Sunday Reed; within the walls and gardens of her estate, called Heide, she entered into a creative and romantic partnership with Nolan, of which her husband John approved. However, Sunday’s pivotal role in the painter’s career also led to a dramatic dispute over ownership of Nolan’s most famous artworks. To whom did they belong: artist or muse?
Seven years before painting Rosa Mutabilis, Nolan had sought out Sunday and John Reed. By 1938, the couple had established their reputation as influential patrons of contemporary Australian art. Sunday came from a wealthy family, and John was a successful lawyer; they poured their collective wealth into buying art from Melbourne’s galleries, and they also began to back a small group of emerging artists, providing them with financial and moral support.
Nolan, on the other hand, was a shy young artist and writer, from a working-class background – he was the son of a Melbourne tram driver – and more than ten years younger than the Reeds. Yet he had enough self-belief to take his portfolio to John’s law office, hoping to impress him. That same night, John took Nolan’s art home to show Sunday, and the next evening they invited him to dinner at Heide.
Heide was a large Victorian farmhouse which the couple had bought in 1934. Located on the outskirts of Melbourne, in Heidelberg, Victoria, it came with six hectares of land. This was the spot where the Australian impressionists had come to paint, and it was ideal for what the Reeds had in mind; they wanted to create a retreat where artists could stay, paint and share in their vision of creating a radical new style of modern Australian art.
Sunday and John worked hard to renovate both the house and its surrounding land, which backed onto the Yarra River. It was Sunday who took on the responsibility of cultivating and caring for Heide’s extensive gardens; earlier in life, she had wanted to be an artist and treated the soil as a canvas, planting in it wild flowers, herbs, an orchard of fruit trees, vegetables and, most significantly, hundreds of rose bushes.
In their role as patrons of the arts, the Reeds created a haven for Australia’s avant-garde artists: Albert Tucker, Sam Atyeo, Joy Hester, Charles Blackman, Mirka Mora and others. Sunday tended to the artists as she did the garden, with creativity and care. She embraced a reimagined, influential role of home-maker and hostess, cooking dinner for her guests, inviting them to engage in intellectual debates and welcoming them to stay for weeks, months and even years.
At times, the Reeds’ attachments to their artists also became romantic, as they began to experiment with an open, loving marriage. Their first affair was with the modern painter, Sam Atyeo: Sunday and Atyeo became lovers, as did John and Atyeo’s girlfriend and fellow artist, Moya Dyring. This casual arrangement paved the way for another, more significant partnership, between Sunday and Nolan.
The Reeds saw in Nolan an important blend of ambition and talent that they could foster, and accepted him into their circle of artists at Heide. He was soon visiting the couple on a regular basis, and spent his days reading in their impressive library, exploring the modernist art collection which hung on Heide’s walls, and discussing literature with them.
During this time, Sunday and Nolan discovered a shared interest in the free-spirited nineteenth-century French poet, Arthur Rimbaud. His Symbolist writings expressed a guiding principle which both individuals subscribed to – that ‘one must be absolutely modern’. Nolan helped Sunday to translate poems by Rimbaud, which they published in Australia’s leading modernist journal, Angry Penguins, alongside reproductions of art by Heide’s painters.
At the same time, Sunday deliberately steered Nolan, who was then keen on pursuing a career as a poet, away from writing and towards painting. She would read poems by Rimbaud and ask him to make art in response; this gave birth to abstract portraits of the poet, such as Head of Rimbaud (1939), in which Nolan celebrated the literary muse, whom he and Sunday shared, in simplified, geometric shapes, echoing the cubism of Cézanne.
Under the direction of Sunday, Nolan chose to pursue a career as a full-time painter. Sunday had carved a critical role for herself in his life, assuming responsibility as his mentor, champion and intellectual partner. It was also clear to everyone at Heide that Sunday and Nolan had fallen in love. Nolan was not long married, but within a year, in 1938 he left his wife and baby to live with the Reeds.
Nolan entered into what the French call a ménage à trois with the couple; Sunday shared her time between the artist and her husband. This arrangement was not without its difficulties, and resulted in tensions between John and Sunday. However, John never attempted to prevent the growing affection between Sunday and Nolan, and had affairs of his own, with artists at Heide as well as his legal secretary.
The artist Joy Hester wrote perceptively about Sunday’s relationships with those around her at Heide, ‘Sun has a power over everyone, which she uses very subtly to its fullest extent. She has the power of Nolan over John, he daren’t make a false move if he wants to keep her, she has the power of “giving” over Nolan, also he is in love with her and cannot see lots of things. She has the power over me, that I cannot answer her back.’
Although Sunday was dominant, she did also have a softer side, which was what drew artists to her. As Hester went on to explain, ‘Sun… gives a lot of love and I have the greatest admiration for the sensitivity that she possesses, which is on a high level, higher than I have ever met before… with a high degree of intelligence… at her best she is unbeatable for insight and sensitivity.’
Nolan captured this sensitivity in his poignant painting Rosa Mutabilis, in which he portrays Sunday as his inspiration and romantic muse. She appears as a vision of loveliness: her distinctive blue eyes shine out, lighting up the composition. Nolan surrounds her with pale yellow and white rose petals, consciously evoking art history’s long-standing, symbolic association between the rose and lovers.
This painting simultaneously shows Nolan celebrating Sunday’s power as an inventive gardener. He clearly depicts her against the backdrop of Heide, with the white farmhouse she had redecorated, framed by pine trees she had planted. In the foreground, Sunday emerges from one of her rose bushes; she appears as an icon of her own domain, goddess-like, with her hair melting into the green grass and the Heide soil.
Numerous other Heide artists painted portraits of Sunday, often accompanied by roses, as their muse. Hester, with whom it is believed that Sunday also entered into a romantic relationship, painted a psychologically charged watercolour, Lovers with Rose, in around 1947. It shows the head and torso of a naked male figure; his lover is cut from view, but her arm hangs across his chest, and in her hand she holds a pale pink rose. This anonymous couple epitomises the multiple romantic affairs which took place at Heide, centred around Sunday and her beautiful rose garden.
From 1942 to 1944, Nolan had to leave Heide, as he was conscripted into the Australian Army and stationed in the Wimmera, which was over three hundred kilometres away. He wrote daily, sending separate letters to both Sunday and John, with whom he maintained a close, intimate friendship. In this earnest correspondence, Nolan refers to Sunday as his ‘blue rose’ and discloses his desire to be reunited with her: ‘I do tremble for you sometimes girl you are not aware of how much you have given me.’
The correspondence from this time clearly demonstrates the intellectual stimulus which Nolan sought, and received, from both John and Sunday. In long letters, he posed questions and reflections on art history, artists past and present, poetry, politics, exhibitions, music and philosophy. Nolan respected and valued Sunday’s judgements and observations across all of the arts, and it’s evident that they were committed co-conspirators in developing a new language of modernism in Australian art.
Sunday had encouraged Nolan, like all of the Heide artists, to paint the Australian landscape in experimental terms. This is evident in his Rosa Mutabilis painting, which is bold in colour, abstracted and light-filled. However, while Nolan lived in rural Wimmera, he imagined the landscape in ever more vibrant colours, developing an increasingly exuberant style. He was looking both to Aboriginal art and its people, who feel a deep sense of belonging to the land, and towards a new type of painting, which defined the Australian outback in a raw, direct manner.
In August 1944, Nolan illegally deserted the army and retreated to Heide, where he was welcomed by the Reeds. Within the walls of this house, he painted twenty-seven works which are now recognised as the most important paintings of his career. Once again, he focused on the motif of the parched Australian landscape, but he also brought an iconic figure into his images: Ned Kelly.
Kelly was a nineteenth-century Australian outlaw, bushranger and gang leader, who has become an infamous, and controversial, figure in the country’s history. While Kelly was a much-feared criminal in the eyes of many Australians, he was also a symbolic, anti-establishment hero who fought against the British colonists and corrupt police government. Nolan perceived of him, and portrayed him, in this light: ‘Obviously, I have treated Ned Kelly as some sort of hero,’ the artist later reflected.
Throughout the series of Ned Kelly paintings, Nolan re-tells the story of this Australian rebel hero, who was eventually captured, tried and executed. In his paintings, Kelly appears against the stark, simplified backdrop of the bush, in his homemade armour, often on horseback. These images are a celebration of Australian history as indelibly tied to its landscape. Just as we can see in Nolan’s earlier painting of Sunday, who is surrounded by roses in her garden, people and place are inextricably interconnected. As Nolan famously explained, ‘I find the desire to paint the landscape involves a wish to hear more of the stories that take place in the landscape… which persist in the memory, to find expression in such household sayings as “game as Ned Kelly”.’
Many art historians understand Ned Kelly as the alter ego of Sidney Nolan. Australian researcher, David Rainey, points out important similarities between the painter and his subject: ‘Both were fugitives from the law – Kelly a bushranger with a price on his head, Nolan absent without leave from the army; both had Irish roots, although Nolan’s much-vaunted Irish heritage was Northern Ireland Protestant, not the Catholic roots of Ned Kelly. Nolan never bothered to correct this misapprehension – over time it would serve him well.’
There is no doubt that Nolan imagined Ned Kelly as his criminal counterpart, but could he also be the alter ego of Sunday Reed? Like Nolan, Sunday was a rebel, having defiantly turned her back on the traditional, middle-class life expected of her. Before meeting and marrying John, Sunday had been briefly married to an American man, Leonard Quinn, despite her family’s disapproval, and spent her early twenties travelling around much of Europe with him. But, early into the marriage on this extended trip, Quinn was unfaithful – he gave Sunday gonorrhoea and an emergency hysterectomy to prevent the disease from spreading further left her infertile. Abandoned, Sunday subsequently sought and found comfort within an alternative, bohemian community of artists in Paris, before returning to Australia. This early streak of rebellion, as well as such betrayal, undoubtedly informed Sunday’s second and thoroughly modern marriage.
During the early stages of their relationship, Nolan and Sunday had connected with the poetry of Rimbaud, which inspired the artist’s experiments into abstract portraiture. Now, the couple identified with another free-spirited figure, Ned Kelly. They had a shared vision – to create a new, progressive language of Australian painting – and Kelly was the ideal icon who could serve this purpose, particularly when portrayed against the sparse outback.
It’s impossible to separate Nolan’s Ned Kelly series from his relationship with Sunday: all but one of the twenty-seven paintings were made on the kitchen table at Heide, where Nolan worked with her by his side. He refuted the idea that Sunday had come up with the idea for his Ned Kelly series, though he did acknowledge her critical role in its conception, referring to her as a ‘catalyst’.
Art historian Janine Burke also proposes that Sunday helped Nolan to paint some of these seminal works: ‘She moved at that stage from being the studio assistant who was priming canvases and framing things to painting sections of the work.’ Burke suggests that Sunday, once an art student, painted the red-and-white tiled floor in The Trial with a stencil and the patchwork quilt in The Defence of Aaron Sherritt. Her evidence is a watercolour painting of a woman by Nolan with the dedication, ‘For the one who paints such beautiful squares’.
Without further proof, it is impossible to ascertain if Sunday painted parts of the Ned Kelly works. Nevertheless, without her, Nolan would not have created this seminal series; she was intimately involved in its creation and her vital input was recognised by other artists at Heide. In a letter written by Mirka Mora, the muralist acknowledges Sunday’s contribution: ‘Dear Sunday, the Nolan painting is so beautiful… And I realise it is not the painter who is the genius – for he is merely an instrument – but the person who sees it is a great painting… You are the genius for having seen at the time how beautiful the Nolan paintings were.’
Nolan, too, recognised that profoundly personal currents run through the canvases: ‘I suppose I have to say that the Ned Kelly series, when I see them I feel that is a kind of rather important point in my whole painting career and a break through… they have an inner content which is known to me which is rather different to what seems to be their meaning… The Kelly paintings were done at a very critical stage of my personal life… In a way there are a lot of characters in the Kelly paintings that are related to my own life at the time.’
Imagery of Heide, and its gardens, is certainly embedded in the series. Years later, Nolan spoke about his work The Trial, revealing, ‘The tiled floor in red and white was in a house I was in once.’ Outwardly, his paintings tell the story of Australia’s legendary outlaw, but the saga is equally about the artist’s relationship with Sunday. Themes of injustice, love and betrayal pervade these paintings, echoing his affair with Sunday, which was coming to an end.
After the Ned Kelly series was completed, Nolan left Heide and never returned. By this time, Sunday had another person in her life – not a romantic partner, but a child. Unable to have children of her own, she took over the care of, and eventually adopted, Hester’s son Sweeney after Hester was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 1947. Nolan also had a new woman in his life, the sister of John, Cynthia Reed, whom he married in 1948, cementing the end of his affair with Sunday.
Nolan left the Ned Kelly paintings to Sunday, writing to John with a clear reason why: ‘I do not feel that the Kellys belong to anyone other than Sun.’ The feeling was mutual; she also felt that they belonged to her. If we return to the concept of the artist’s patron: as she had not only financed Nolan, but also supported his creativity with emotional, intellectual and practical support, it’s easy to see why the artworks were assigned to Sunday at this time.
Nolan’s decision to leave the paintings with the Reeds also enabled them to continue on their mission. The couple remained committed to championing Nolan, as an individual artist, but also as a figure within their wider aim to promote Australian art on an international stage. In 1948, the couple showed the Ned Kelly series at Velasquez Gallery in Melbourne. The following year, they took them to Paris for an exhibition at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in 1949.
However, as Nolan achieved international success, his stance on the ownership of the Ned Kelly paintings shifted, and dramatically so. He wrote to the Reeds, demanding the return of his paintings, so that they could be shown in exhibitions; Sunday refused to let them go, perceiving herself as their co-creator. When the Whitechapel Gallery in London formally requested the paintings for his solo show in 1957, the Reeds were adamant in their rejection of the application.
John wrote to Nolan, ‘For Sun there is no change… your paintings are just the same in relation to herself as they ever were.’ Nolan mounted his Whitechapel retrospective without the Ned Kelly series. The British Council was next to approach the Reeds, requesting the paintings in 1959. This time, the couple sent over two hundred paintings and numerous portfolios of drawings – but again, they kept the Ned Kelly series at Heide.
This argument over the paintings’ ownership dragged on. The Reeds continued to exhibit the series internationally, sharing Australia’s new modernism with the world, but they would not return the paintings to their maker. During the 1960s John wrote to Nolan on several occasions, making clear the couple’s reason for claiming their rights to the paintings: ‘Your life and ours were inextricably woven in a pattern of complete mutuality and intimacy. Each made his own contribution to the life we all led together, and your paintings were part of your contribution, even though you said Sunday painted them as much as you did. These paintings became in their own way as much a part of the total life we lived as Sunday’s cooking, as the trees I planted, as the books we all read… without your life at Heide, a great many of them would never have been painted.’
In 1953, aged thirty-six, Nolan left Australia and settled in Britain, where he continued to paint the Australian landscape. Meanwhile, in 1956, the Reeds established the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Melbourne, with Sunday assuming the role of curator and critic. Two years later, the Reeds re-branded this gallery, reopening as the Museum of Modern Art of Australia, donating a huge number of works from their art collection by Hester, Tucker and others. Among this gift, they included Nolan’s Ned Kelly series.
Nolan, however, could not let the dispute go. In 1971, he published a book of poems, with accompanying illustrations, titled Paradise Garden, in which he expressed his distress and ‘shame’ at the ongoing argument with the Reeds over his paintings.
SKY-BLUE
Tremulous and painting
she found me,
mixing on the table
the mountains
and the mist,
where can I exist
she asked
how sit mutually
gazing for eternity
at the hard
blue canopy,
along with first-born
flowers she came
and the paintings
never spoke again
except in shame
Nolan’s poetry frames Sunday as a toxic partner; he compares her to a ‘snake’ and writes of ‘original sin’ within the gardens of Heide, imagined as an Edenic realm of evil temptation, in which he should have avoided the forbidden fruit. He later reflected on the publication of these poems, which hurt Sunday deeply: ‘As a human being I didn’t want to do the book but, as an artist, I had to exorcise something and comment on it in this way.’
Nolan, looking back, considered himself the victim of abuse at the hands of the Reeds. We often think of the muse as the exploited party in their relationship with an artist, but on this occasion was it, perhaps, the other way round? Did Sunday – who was significantly older, richer and an influential patron – deliberately misuse her position of power? Nolan certainly seems to think so, as their relationship crossed the line from professional patron-artist into an intimate and increasingly tangled romantic partnership.
Nolan remained bitter towards the Reeds until the end of his life. On one occasion he questioned in his diary, ‘Who has the Rosa Mutabilis painting? Barrie Reid? What is the point of that. I will repaint it. with a skeleton of the girl in the tree. Ern Malley as a virus. Roses also in Sole Arabian Tree.’ Luckily, Nolan never repainted Rosa Mutabilis. Today, the painting still hangs at Heide, now transformed into the Heide Museum of Modern Art and open to the public.
Rosa Mutabilis was painted as a pure celebration of Heide in its heyday, during which time Sunday was Nolan’s patron and romantic partner, his muse, mentor and ally. At this point in their lives, Nolan and Sunday needed one another as they collectively strove to develop an original, avant-garde Australian art, which reached its pinnacle in Nolan’s seminal Ned Kelly series. In his sixties, Nolan once again reflected on his time at Heide, remarking that his life had been ‘indelibly influenced by the Melbourne experience’.
Until the ends of their lives, John and Sunday remained committed to cultivating and championing a new style of modern Australian art. Today, Nolan’s Ned Kelly images are understood to be one of the greatest series of Australian paintings of the twentieth century. Sunday never returned the paintings to Nolan but, in 1977, donated them to the National Gallery of Australia. Far too infrequently do muses have a say in the ownership, exhibition and sale of an artwork. However, in this case, and as both John and Sunday would have wished, the paintings, impossible to divide between artist and muse, belong instead to Australia.