Collection highlights tour

This painting by Jeffrey Smart, perhaps the finest masterpiece of his later years, is a perfect example of his habit of finding motifs delivered without warning. For, given the calculation and precision typifying his long career as an artist, Smart has never quite known what is in store to appeal to his compositional interests driving around the industrial estates of Arezzo, or walking through a flea market in Rome, or a back street in Sydney. His process has a curious connection with a 19th-century method inculcated by French artist Lecoq de Boisbaudran as a kind of competition with the seduction of photography. Students were encouraged to look at a motif for a few seconds, turn their backs on it, commit it to memory, and let imagination go to work. Whistler adopted this practice in France and England; and in Australia half a century later Nolan developed his own instinctive version of it to spectacular effect. Smart differed from those two however in his slow, deliberate construction of a scaffolding to ho