Sir Sidney Robert Nolan OM AC CBE RA (22 April 1917 – 28 November 1992) was one of the leading Australian artists of the 20th century.

He enrolled at the Prahran Technical College (now part of Swinburne University of Technology), Department of Design and Crafts, in a course which he had already begun part-time by correspondence.

In 1933, at the age of 16, he began working for Fayrefield Hats, Abbotsford, producing advertising and display stands with spray paints and dyes for six years.

In 1938, he met and married his first wife, graphic designer Elizabeth Paterson,[2] with whom he had a daughter, but his marriage soon broke up because of his increasing involvement with the Reeds.

The Ern Malley hoax poems were seen by Nolan and Sunday Reed as being uncannily prescient in touching on their own personal circumstances.

[12] Nolan painted a wide range of personal interpretations of historical and legendary figures, including explorers Burke and Wills, and Eliza Fraser.

Although the Depression and World War II occurred during that period, Nolan decided to concentrate on something other than people struggling in life.

Nolan recognised that the conceptual image of the black square (Kelly's helmet and armour) had been part of modern art since World War I.

[citation needed] The intensity of the colours of the land and bush, along with its overall smooth texture, help create harmony between legend, symbol and visual impact.

Locally, the arrival of the Russian artist Danila Vassilieff in Melbourne in the mid-1930s, with his simple and direct art, was significant for Nolan.

[20][21] English critic Robert Melville wrote in 1963 that Nolan's Kelly belonged to "the company of twentieth-century personages which includes Picasso's minotaur, Chirico's mannequins, Ernst's birdmen, Bacon's popes and Giacometti's walking man".

Paintings of Dimboola landscapes by Sidney Nolan, who was stationed in the area while on army duty in World War II, can be found in the National Gallery of Victoria.

[24] In 1965, Nolan completed a large mural (20 m by 3.6 m) depicting the 1854 Eureka Stockade, rendered in jewellery enamel on 1.5 tonnes of heavy gauge copper.

Nolan employed the "finger-and-thumb" drawing technique of Indigenous Australian sandpainters to create the panoramic scene.

Commissioned by economist H. C. Coombs, the mural is located at the entrance to the Reserve Bank of Australia's Melbourne office on Collins Street.

Nolan's lifelong engagement with the theatre began in 1939 when he was commissioned to create décor for French ballet dancer Serge Lifar's revised version of Icare.

Lifar, then on tour in Australia with the Original Ballet Russe, offered Nolan the job after a chance encounter with his abstract work.

Set at a bush picnic, the piece relates the mating rituals of the lyrebird to the masculine posturing of Australian males.

It is the deep, rich mysterious gloom of a sunlight-shafted Australian rainforest with the pillars of its ghostly white gums rising through its depths.

During the Tin Symphony segment of the 2000 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, a multitude of performers donned stylised costumes based on Nolan's distinctive Ned Kelly imagery, and a painting from Nolan's original 1946-47 Ned Kelly series was displayed on a giant screen in the stadium.

The small boy's hallucination of camel riders in the desert was a direct reference to Nolan's Burke and Wills paintings.

[37][38] David Rainey's 2014 play "The Ménage at Soria Moria" is a fictitious performance piece exploring the relationship between Nolan and the Reeds – both the heady days at Heide during the 1940s, and the less well known degeneration over the next 35 years.

This Dreaming, Spinning Thing was commissioned by ABCTV as a companion film to Nolan's 1967 retrospective exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

[40] Kelly Country (1972), directed by Stuart Cooper with commentary by Orson Welles, explores Australia's landscape and folklore through Nolan's imagery.

[42] A 2009 documentary by filmmaker Catherine Hunter, Mask and Memory charts the course of Nolan's personal life, including his complex relationship with the Reeds at Heide.