It is an irony that one of the most European of our painters is regarded, in the popular mind, as being the most characteristically Australian. Drysdale, perhaps more so than any other modern Australian painter, depended on European models: his paintings locate themselves not in the outback but in the European modern tradition – beginning with Cézanne and extending through Picasso, Braque, Modigliani, de Chirico and Tanguy to Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland.