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Amid Barry Humphries’s stage parody and Max Robinson’s near-perfect forgery, Nolan’s Glenrowan Siege lays bare the frailties of provenance, authenticity, and auction authority.
In the annals of Australian art history, Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly pictures are as Australian as Dame Edna, the comedic drag creation of Barry Humphries with whom Nolan’s Kelly series shares a curious history. In 1946, Nolan began working on the subject of Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang. The first, twenty-five paintings in the National Gallery of Australia’s permanent collection—a gift from Sunday Reed—read like a book. Each painting is a page in the narrative, an episode of the Kelly drama played out. These works are now highly sought after, realising high prices on the secondary market; take for example, Ned Kelly: Crossing Bridge (1964), which sold in August 2024 for $1.2 million.
Auction Lots with Missing Information: Sidney Nolan’s The Glenrowan Siege (1955) by Penelope Jackson is featured in full in Issue 3 of Memo magazine.
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