Eric Wilson, 1911-1946.

Hailed by Douglas Dundas as ‘one of the bright stars in the firmament of Australian art during the 1940s’, Eric Wilson is remarkable for having achieved widespread success not only as an abstractionist (whose still-lifes represented some of the first experiments in Cubism by an Antipodean artist), but equally, as a modern realist painter of European cityscapes – impressively exemplified here by Pont Neuf, c.1939.

Awarded the New South Wales Travelling Art Scholarship in 1937, Wilson accordingly embarked for England in June the same year, studying first briefly at the Royal Academy before enrolling at the more progressive Westminster School under British modern painters, Mark Gertler and Elmslie Owen. The latter was especially influential, urging the young artist to proceed in the vein of the French avant-garde ‘according to knowledge rather than mere vision’, and encouraging Wilson to pursue his cubist explorations further at Amedée Ozenfant’s Academy in Earl’s Court.

In the early months of 1939, Wilson departed London for the Continent where he travelled and sketched in Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy, absorbing, among other things, that sense of rounded volumetric form so revered in the work of Italian Quattrocentro primitives such as Piero della Francesca. Above all though, it was the city of Paris that inspired Wilson most – ‘not the large-scale vistas of the master-planned metropolis… but the more intimate curves and corners of narrow streets, and tree-lined quays of the Seine’3 – and thus, he spent hours capturing en plein air the picturesque streets and majestic bridges in drawings that would later provide the basis for his celebrated series of Paris cityscapes undertaken upon his return to Australia in late 1939 following the outbreak of World War II.