Always happiest with landscape, and combining a stained-glass workplace with the friendship and encouragement of Jock Frater, Shore concentrated on the immediate, often the scrubby riverbank, and avoided the bigger picture. The humility of his up-close vision – which almost blurs the wood with the trees – surely influenced the successive layers of creamy pigment in the paintings of Fred Williams. Although this important Shore legacy is not really pursued in the book, the proof lies in their similar temperaments and physical contiguity. For it was in Chrystobel Crescent, Hawthorn, where Shore spent his last years and Williams was living nearby (in the Blackmans’ laneway coach-house), that Williams coursed through his sapling forest fence-like landscapes and laid the foundations of his mature style. His spatial solution to Shore’s forest impasse was to detach his alla prima observations from their natural casual locations. In his walks and talks with Shore, who had long resented the sudden rupture of his ‘creative’ teaching partnership with George Bell, Williams reconciled their different teachings, arranging his complex perceptual markings within the time-honoured formal structures of art.

Personally, I like the idea of the Hawthorn coach-house – the source of Charles Blackman’s Schoolgirl series and Alice in Wonderland paintings – becoming the doorway to Williams’s vision of and beyond landscape.