Ian Fairweather: A Life in Letters

When he died in 1974 after a long period of self-imposed austerity and improvisation on Bribie Island, Queensland, Ian Fairweather was at the apex of his fame. He had been called ‘our greatest painter’, and his works were keenly sought by galleries, collectors and artists.

Born in 1891 in Scotland, Fairweather had lived a peripatetic life, forever seeking the right place to settle. He was a prodigious and idiosyncratic letter writer—wryly documenting for friends and family members his trav...