The Boom Gate, Sydney Harbour, 1944 / Harold Greenhill

ML 1619

fonds

1944

Graphic Materials, Paintings

9676374

1 painting - 42 x 51 cm - oil on board

Harold Thomas Greenhill (1914-1995) was born in Lakemba, NSW. He attended the Royal Art Society School in George Street from 1935, he excelled, gaining a full-time scholarship in 1936. Finally taking up his 1942 Travelling Scholarship in 1946, Greenhill went to England returning to Sydney in 1950 to pursue his artistic career. In 1950 he won the Sulman prize and later worked as a lecturer for the National Art Gallery’s Travelling Art Exhibition and a teacher of art, living with his wife and family at Seaforth from 1954. Several retrospectives of the artist’s work have been staged: at the Manly Art Gallery, in 1979 and 1988, and at the Orange Regional Gallery in 2012.

Reference
Library correspondence file

Previously held in The Fred and Elinor Wrobel Collection: The Sea and the Shore

Oil painting on compressed board in original, white-washed wooden artist’s frame. This seascape records a view of the Eastern Boom Gate in operation on Sydney Harbour in 1944, the primary access point in the anti-torpedo and anti submarine net suspended across the harbour as part of the city’s defence system during World War II. The structure of the boom is shown, specifically the ‘pyramid’ moorings on piles, winches for raising and lowering and the use of buoys to suspend the nets, as well as the steam driven floating crane used in the July 1942 salvaging of the destroyed M27 midget subs. Also pictured is a re-purposed ferry the HMAS Kuramia acting as boom vessel and a figure in a rowboat.

In copyright:
Copyright holder:: Estate of Harold Greenhill
Please acknowledge:: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and Courtesy copyright holder

Titled and dated in pencil on verso.

Label 'Australian War Memorial, Acc. No: ARTOL00018' on verso of frame

Signed 'Greenhill’ in light green paint lower right, and 'Harold Greenhill' in pencil on verso.
Annotation in Elinor Wrobel’s hand: ‘FRAME made by ARTIST' in blue pen on verso of frame.