(b Bognor Regis, Sussex, 7 Feb. 1912; d Sydney, 29 June 1981). Australian painter of English birth. His family had owned land in Australia since the 1820s and he spent several years of his childhood there. The family settled in Melbourne in 1923 and in the late 1930s Drysdale gave up farming to study art. After moving to Sydney in 1940, he devoted himself full-time to painting and his work became well known throughout Australia during the 1940s. It revived the tradition of hardship, tragedy, and melancholy associated with the Australian bush that had been obscured by the much more optimistic interpretation developed during the 1890s by the city-based painters of the Heidelberg School. However, in place of the basically Impressionist style of the Heidelberg painters, Drysdale blended Expressionist and Surrealist features founded on his knowledge of contemporary European painting.