Fred WILLIAMS
Australia 1927 – Australia 1982
England 1951-56

Landscape with red fox 1967
oil on canvas
signed: l.r.
141.0 (h) x 131.0 (w) cm
Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria H. C. E. Evans Bequest Fund 1971
© estate of Fred Williams

Landscape with red fox was inspired by Williams’s real encounter with a fox on a painting trip in Lysterfield with fellow artist Gil Jamieson. Williams painted an earlier version (which he later destroyed) and also completed a series of etchings of this subject.

In this painting there is great vitality in the painterly surface of the sky and landscape, including little touches of bright yellow wattle. To emphasise the trees he used very thick paint and this is combined with colourful, translucent glazes over the surface, creating an incredibly rich, dense colour orchestration. A remarkable feature of the painting is the unexpected, out-of-scale, red fox.