Hans Heysen

Sir Hans Heysen, OBE, ( born October 8, 1877 in Hamburg, † July 2, 1968 ) was an Australian artist. He was particularly known for his watercolors of the Australian bush and won several times the Wynne Prize.

Life

Wilhelm Ernst Hans Franz Heysen was born in Hamburg Germany. He emigrated in 1884 at the age of six years with his family to Adelaide in South Australia from. There he was interested at a young age for the arts. Then the father took no fixed employment, Heysen visited 1885-1892 different schools and helped his father at work. During school holidays he could visit friends in Hahndorf. At 14 he left school and worked for five shillings a week at a hardware store and started 16 during his free art at the Art Academy to study.

In 1899 he was able to win a tendered by Sir James Linton price for watercolor painting and a previous winner of a charcoal drawing. At the age of 22 years, four businessmen paid him to study in Europe under the condition that he the images that flourished there granted them. From 1900 to 1903 he studied in Europe, mostly in Paris at the Academie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux -Arts, but also in Italy. After his return, he settled first in Adelaide down, opened an art school and devoted himself entirely to painting. 1904 Heysen married his wife Selma and won the Wynne Prize for the first time. In 1908 he moved with his family to Hahndorf in South Australia. In 1926, he traveled for the first time the north of South Australia, where the rocky semi-desert region of Flinders Ranges exercised a special fascination for him. There he found - how to Brachina Gorge ( guard at Brachina Gorge, National Gallery of Victoria) - always new designs.

" The sun, its light and heat is my religion. (...) I must confess that I her [Note: the desert ] 'm succumbed spell. I've seen the wilderness, calm days of kristallner clarity when the eye can receive the wonderful feeling of infinity. [ It is for the painter ] a new, hitherto almost untouched field. "

In 1912 Heysen acquired a property in the Adelaide Hills near Hahndorf, where he lived until 1968, 90 -year-old died.

It was founded in 1945 officer of the Order of the British Empire and in 1959 knighted. Australia's longest long-distance footpath of the 1,200 -km Heysen Trail is named after him, as well as the Heysen Range, a mountain range in the Flinders Ranges National Park.

Also his daughter Nora Heysen (1911-2003) is regarded as more important Australian artist.

Work

Heysen was primarily known for his depictions of the Australian landscape and is now considered one of the most important and most famous Australian artists.

Heysens works are now in the National Gallery of Victoria, ( Guardian of the Brachina Gorge, watercolor from 1937, A lord of the bush, oil, 1908), in the National Library of Australia ( Brachina Gorge, Watercolour, Old man Collins drawing, Study of Nora Heysen as a child, drawing, charcoal on paper, Study of Nora Heysen as a child, pencil drawing ) and the British Royal collection in London ( Brachina Gorge, 1933).

The Wynne Prize

Heysen won the Wynne Prize nine times. Awarded to: