Born and raised in Australia, Sidney Nolan relocated to London in 1950. His dark, surrealist, and semiabstract canvases gained immediate critical attention, echoing as they did work by other prominent outsiders, most notably the Irish-born Francis Bacon. Nolan nevertheless returned to Australia frequently, responding in 1952 to a commission to record the effects of a great drought in Queensland. This remote Australian landscape with its “brooding air of almost Biblical intensity” moved him greatly. The carcasses of cows and horses were, as he noted, “strewn on the baked and cracked plains . . . which bear no trace of surface waters.” It was to these desolate and contorted animal forms—at least three of which are intertwined in this painting—that he returned most frequently, finding in them an image that spoke not only to the drought but also to the destruction of the Second World War. Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016