Back of houses, Spring Hill c.1945

When Vincent Brown returned to Australia from England in 1940, he brought with him an approach to painting influenced by European Modernism that was unfamiliar to Brisbane audiences. Prior to his travels, Brown had worked for a commercial art firm and practised a tonal realism inspired by the watercolours of Queensland painter JJ Hilder. While in London, however, Brown’s studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, and his lessons with Iain Macnab at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, introduced him to new modes of expression. (Macnab championed the simplification of form and bold use of colour, drawing on the work of French painters such as Henri Matisse and Paul Cézanne.)

Brown’s paintings from the 1940s demonstrate that he had absorbed these ideas. Here, he has adopted a high-key palette and emphasised the geometric qualities of the buildings and trees. Responses to the exhibition Brown held in Brisbane in 1945 were ambivalent, with the critic for the Courier-Mail proffering that, ‘Art lovers may like or dislike his point of view, but they will agree that his work is original and definitely personal’.