The Chase (Brack)
painting by John Brack
The Chase is a 1959 painting by Australian artist John Brack. The painting depicts three girls–Brack's daughters–running in a playful manner.
The painting has a similar theme to Brack's Two Running Girls and both were first exhibited in August 1959 at the Antipodeans Exhibition at the Victorian Artists Society galleries in Melbourne.
The painting was included in two major exhibitions of Brack's work hosted by the National Gallery of Victoria in 1987 and 2009. A study for the work remains in the Gallery's collection.
The Chase is a classic Brack piece, featuring the artist’s own daughters running in a playful manner. This energetic and important painting is a familiar, everyday subject that simultaneously depicts the fun and simplicity of childhood games while alluding to the darker side of human nature in the ‘shadows of anxiety’ that are cast by the running girls.
Art Gallery of Ballarat director Louise Tegart noted "The Chase is one of Brack’s great paintings which would sit comfortably with the artist’s iconic works such as The Bar (1954), Collins St., 5 pm (1955) and The Car (1955)" and "While it appears quite a simplistic image, there’s a lot going on. It could be about children at play, a symbol of young girls moving into womanhood, or the performance of femininity and womanhood."
Provenance
Brack's family donated the work to the Art Gallery of Ballarat in 2022 and it remains part of their collection.
“The Chase (Brack)” enters the record as painting by John Brack. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Chase, Brack and painting can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“The Chase (Brack)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Chase, Brack and painting provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q128303787. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1959, 1987, 2009 and 1954.
Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Chase (Brack)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.