Impressionist Arthur Streeton landscape discoveries at AGNSW
A major exhibition of the beloved artist has unearthed lost works and presents a passionate environmentalist, alarmed at land clearing and the felling of majestic eucalypts.
Art curator Wayne Tunnicliffe experienced the hot, angry destruction of last summer’s bushfires when his acreage at Kangaroo Valley, NSW was all but burned out by the Currowan blaze. Tunnicliffe was not at the property at the time and fortunately his home was spared. But the fire on January 4 destroyed fences, sheds and other infrastructure on the property as well as trees and undergrowth.
“It’s not a working property, it’s only about 30 acres where we are preserving the rainforest,” Tunnicliffe says.
“When the fire came through on January 4 there were 80m flames, ferocious wind. The rainforest has gone, it’s not coming back. But the regeneration that’s happening on the ground is extraordinary. We have fields of wildflowers we’ve never had before.”
At the time, Tunnicliffe was deep in preparations for this year’s major exhibition of Arthur Streeton at the Art Gallery of NSW, where he is head curator of Australian art. The show will bring together about 150 paintings by the widely loved Australian Impressionist and there is a lavish catalogue of almost 400 pages. The bushfire brought home to Tunnicliffe, in the most devastating way, one of the themes of the exhibition, which is Streeton’s passionate environmentalism.
Streeton loved the Australian landscape, and in some ways it’s difficult to say whether the landscape made him as an artist, or if he, through his art, helped show Australians a new way of looking at the land. He was in awe of the sunshine — the glinting light on the water of Sydney Harbour, or the hard, blinding light reflected on stone in his early masterpiece Fire’s On. His paintings of big blue skies and straw-dry paddocks defined a distinctively Australian pastoral, in pictures such as Golden Summer, Eaglemont and Land of the Golden Fleece.
His close observation of the natural world, and his enjoyment of being in it, produced in him powerful convictions about the dangers of environmental mismanagement. He opposed insensitive mining projects and the destruction of old growth eucalypts for woodchip or fence posts. He foresaw the disaster that would follow large-scale land clearing, turning forested wilderness into barren desert.
One of the astonishing things about Streeton is that he had very little formal training in the art of painting. He also picked up on one of the transformative art developments of the 19th century, when artists ventured out of the studio and painted directly from nature, in the open, en plein air. The same industrial innovations that enabled Impressionism in France also were available in Australia. Paint tubes made the business of oil painting portable, able to be carried on excursions to the bush. And just as the new railways allowed the French Impressionists to make trips from Paris to picturesque spots in the country, Streeton and other Australian artists travelled by train from Melbourne to the rural district of Heidelberg, or to Mentone, the resort town on Port Phillip Bay.
Tom Roberts was at Mentone on such a painting trip in 1886 when he met Streeton, then 19, for the first time. Roberts recalled: “He was standing out on the wet rocks, painting there, and I saw that his work was full of light and air. We asked him to join us and that was the beginning of a long and delightful association.”
Plein-air painting was the antithesis of studio-based practice and it brought about a revolution in the way Australian artists depicted the landscape. Viennese artist Eugene von Guerard made many memorable paintings in Australia, but he viewed the mountains, gullies and forests through the European lens of the sublime: an emanation of the godhead, majestic but remote.
Streeton and others picked up on the new methods of plein-air painting from art magazines and from artists who had been to Europe, including Roberts. The immediacy of the gesture was everything. Brushstrokes were impressions, spontaneous records of lived experience, not something to be smoothed over and disguised in the studio.
“Streeton and his friends are quite intimate with the landscape — they are camping in it, partying, painting, they’re bathing in rivers naked, walking into the landscape,” Tunnicliffe says. “It’s not about the wilderness connecting you with God, as in von Guerard and the sublime. It’s about living in the environment. And by the 1880s, non-Indigenous Australians are much more comfortable in the landscape, and you get the sense of that in these works. It’s a bush which is lived in.”
Streeton was embarking on his career in the mid 1880s in the lead-up to the centenary of European settlement, when there was a countrywide conversation about Australian nationhood and what it meant to be Australian. At this time the AGNSW acquired its first painting by Streeton, Still Glides the Stream, and Shall for ever Glide — the title is borrowed from Wordsworth; the view is of the Yarra at Heidelberg — painted in 1890, when the artist was 22.
“The conversations begin to focus on what is Australian art, and is there an Australian art practice,” Tunnicliffe says. “It ties in with the emergent nationalism during that period and the lead-in to federation. Nationalism is emerging around the world in the 1880s and 90s, and is often connected to Impressionism in its global iterations, as artists focused on their local landscape and painted it in this way.”
The new painting style was exhibited in the 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition that Streeton, Roberts and Charles Conder organised in Melbourne in 1889. The exhibition name alludes to the dimensions of a cigar-box lid although not all of the pictures were in that format. Among Streeton’s 40 paintings in the show were The National Game, of an Australian football match, and Impression for Golden Summer, a version of Golden Summer, Eaglemont but rendered with even more impressionistic brushstrokes.
This interview with Tunnicliffe is happening in the boardroom at the AGNSW, which has a view across Sydney Harbour to the North Shore and the vicinity of Cremorne. Inconceivable as it may seem today, the area once was slated for a coal mine. Streeton hated the idea that this glorious spot would be turned into an industrial wasteland of “grimy coal ships, hulks, smoke and darkness”. He had come to know the area well: from the early 1890s he and Roberts and others stayed and painted at the Curlew Camp at nearby Mosman. Angered by the proposed coal mine, he painted Cremorne Pastoral in 1895, showing a grassy slope leading down to the sparkling blue of the harbour. The AGNSW acquired the picture that year, and the mine was abandoned after public opposition to it.
Streeton was an artist alert to the tastes of his customers and he was skilful at modifying his style. After the exhibition of Golden Summer, Eaglemont at the Royal Academy in 1891 and at the Paris Salon in 1892, Streeton moved to London in 1897. He adapted his palette as he made sojourns in Egypt and Venice, and he turned to producing English landscapes in the Edwardian manner. On his return visits to Australia he found a market both for these English pictures and for his more familiar Australian landscapes.
In the last year of World War I he was appointed an official war artist and travelled to Villers Bretonneux and Boulogne in France. His paintings from the Western Front are not dramatic battle scenes but landscapes in which the war is happening almost at the periphery. In his painting Villers Bretonneux, the scar of an evacuated trench bisects the landscape, a dead soldier’s legs almost merging with the mud and clay. Stretcher-bearers can be seen in the middle distance and clouds of smoke fill the sky.
After the war, Streeton and his wife, Canadian violinist Nora Clench, returned to live in Australia. Streeton continued to travel widely, within Australia and overseas, but he put down roots by purchasing a property, Longacres, near Olinda in the Dandenong Ranges. The region became a subject for his paintings and for his more outspoken environmentalism. Increasingly he became alarmed at land clearing and the felling of majestic eucalypts. In a painting such as Last of the Messmates, writes environmental lawyer and cultural historian Tim Bonyhady in a catalogue essay, Streeton is protesting at the destruction of forests: a lone timber-cutter using the new gasoline-powered mechanical saw to rip into the fallen messmate.
In other works Streeton made explicit what he saw as the degradation of the landscape. He was outraged at the Victorian government in 1936 granting pulpwood rights over large parts of native forest. The tree-clearing area would include Donna Buang, the mountain visible from Streeton’s retreat at Longacres. Towards the end of his life in 1940 he painted Silvan Dam and Donna Buang, AD 2000, the title indicating a scene 60 years hence, when the valley is arid and denuded, unable to support life. Streeton’s painting is unmistakably a polemic — the reviewer for The Age dismissed it as propaganda — but with the passing of decades and today’s awareness of climate change, it seems prophetic.
There have been some discoveries during preparations for the exhibition. The AGNSW has in its collection The Gloucester Buckets, a landscape painting so unremarkable that the gallery had hung it high on the walls. After a cleaning in the gallery’s conservation studio, it has again revealed Streeton’s characteristic high-toned palette of bright blue sky, hazy mountains and dry paddocks.
An X-ray examination of another painting, a still life of white lilies, has revealed underneath another version of The Gloucester Buckets that was thought missing.
The Streeton exhibition is billed as the most comprehensive show of the artist since a late-career retrospective at the AGNSW in 1931. It’s been two years in the planning and, while last summer’s bushfires were a distraction, nothing could have prepared the gallery for the pandemic’s impact on organising a large-scale exhibition such as this.
The opening has been pushed back from September to November. Many of the paintings are loans from public and private collections in other states — about a third of them are from Victoria — and bringing them to Sydney during the border closures has been an unexpected challenge.
Streeton was an artist who discovered a medium and technique that was perfectly suited to his subject — the Australian landscape. It may explain why he is held in such high affection by gallery-goers and collectors.
“Streeton in his lifetime was probably more discussed than any other artist in Australia,” Tunnicliffe says. “You get that sense of his incredible love for nature and the landscape, and his ability to translate it into paint.
“He wasn’t professionally trained, he hadn’t learned traditional methods, he hadn’t gone through that studio training … and yet he became so accomplished at working with colour that he was considered one of the great colour painters in Australia.”
Streeton is at the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, November 7 to February 14, 2021.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout