He was influenced by abstract and surrealist art, and "created a new vision of the Australian scene as revolutionary and influential as that of Tom Roberts".

[3] George Russell Drysdale was born in Bognor Regis, Sussex, England, to an Anglo-Australian pastoralist family, which settled in Melbourne, Australia in 1923.

He had poor eyesight all his life, and was virtually blind in his left eye from age 17 due to a detached retina (which later caused his application for military service to be rejected).

[5] By the time of his return from the third of these trips in June 1939 Drysdale was recognised within Australia as an important emerging talent, but had yet to find a personal vision.

His decision to leave Melbourne for Albury and then Sydney in 1940 was instrumental in his discovery of his lifelong subject matter, the Australian outback and its inhabitants.

Equally important was the influence of fellow artist Peter Purves Smith in guiding him towards his characteristic mature style with its use of desolate landscapes inhabited by sparse figures under ominous skies.

"[8] His 1950 exhibition at London's Leicester Galleries, at the invitation of Sir Kenneth Clark, was a significant milestone in the history of Australian art.

[9] In 1963 the Reserve Bank of Australia, then led by H. C. Coombs, appointed him to a small committee supervising the note designs for the new Australian decimal currency (which finally came into fruition in 1966).

[15] Drysdale's second wife Maisie was the sister-in-law of the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, with whom Peter Sculthorpe discussed collaborating on an opera based on the Australian adventures of the Irish actor Gustavus Vaughan Brooke.

[16] Christine Wallace suggests that Drysdale "was the visual poet of that passive, all-encompassing despair that endless heat and drought induces", but that it was Sidney Nolan who, with a similar view, "most powerfully projected this take on Australia to the outside world".

In June 2017 one of Drysdale's last works, Grandma's Sunday Walk (1972), sold for $2.97 million, "the fifth-highest price for any Australian artwork at auction".