New exhibition explores landscapes and mountains depicted by leading Australian painters

A new exhibition, Stonework at Castlemaine Art Museum, takes a deep dive into the overbearing reality of geological time in 19th and 20th century landscapes paintings.

Hanover Mine, Malmsbury, by Louis McCubbin. Courtesy: Castelmaine Art Museum.

Mountains, and particularly rocky crags, peaks and sheer cliffs, have always fascinated painters; they evoke the sublime power of nature and a human relationship with the world that transcends the utilitarian ends of activities necessary for survival. Structurally, too, they are like the skeleton of a landscape painting, giving it form and stability.

In Byzantine art, landscape is almost wholly reduced to bare and craggy mountains, like those we still see in the background of Giotto’s Flight into Egypt. In some later Renaissance frescoes such as Masaccio’s The Tribute Money or Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection in Borgo San Sepolcro, the background similarly seems to be occupied by stark and rocky hills, but in this case it is because the trees were painted onto the dry plaster and have flaked off over the centuries. The first dated plein-air Renaissance landscape is a study of rocky mountains by Leonardo da Vinci in 1473.

High mountains with rocky cliffs are a central motif in Chinese landscape painting from the Sung dynasty onwards, and in fact the Chinese characters for landscape mean “mountains and water”, the quintessentially yang and yin motifs in the natural world. In Western classical landscape, including the works of Nicolas Poussin, powerful mountains anchor the composition in the background; in the romantic period, drawn to immersion in the sublime, we come closer to the mountains or find ourselves among them, as in the landscapes of ­Caspar David Friedrich.

This is the period, too, when the genre takes root in Australia. Mountains are less dominant a motif in the compositions of Glover and Martens, but they are central to those of Eugene von Guerard, whose depictions of some sites were so accurate that they have been used as references in attempts to rehabilitate and restore them. Von Guerard’s remarkable care in his topographical work reflects the influence of Alexander von Humboldt, the German philosopher, scientist and intellectual who believed in rebuilding the relationship between art and science; but Humboldt’s ideas are themselves part of a broader movement in intellectual history.

In the wake of the scientific revolution of the 17th century, there was a revolution in chemistry in the second half of the 18th as well an explosion of interest in the sciences of life. Botany was transformed by the Linnaean system of classification and was a scientific passion at the very beginning of the history of modern Australia. Advances in physiology and zoology would soon lead Darwin to the theory of evolution, and Mendel to discover the principles of genetics.

Darwin’s writings in particular – for the first time explicitly proposing a line of descent from apelike creatures to homo sapiens – were profoundly disturbing and led many people to a crisis of religious faith. We remain aware of this crisis today because there are still people who seek to deny Darwinian science, but in fact new discoveries in geology could be almost equally fatal to any fundamentalist interpretation of Biblical accounts of creation.

In 1650, James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh in Ireland, calculated that God’s creation of the world had begun in 4004, probably during the evening of October 22. He had come to this conclusion by adding up the lifespans of all the principal individuals mentioned in the Old Testament, some of whose lives are notoriously very long indeed, as a result of a similar attempt by some scholar in antiquity to link up all of these lives, if necessary by stretching some of them over several centuries (Methuselah lived to the age of 969, but he was far from the only nonacenterian attested in scripture).

It is interesting to note that such an approach to history could never have been countenanced by Herodotus, the father of the discipline, who realised, for example, that the formation of the Nile Delta must have taken tens of thousands of years.

The progress of modern archaeology, and especially of Egyptology, had made Ussher’s date look dubious by the late 18th century. If the pyramids themselves were almost 5000 years old, there wasn’t much room left to fit in everything from the Garden of Eden onwards.

Edwin Stocqueler (1829-95) Castlemaine from Ten Foot Hill 1858 oil on canvas Pioneers and Old Residents Association

But at the same time we were beginning to realise that geological duration was incomparably longer. In the middle of the 18th century, the great French naturalist Buffon had hypothesised that the earth had once been a molten mass, and conducted an experiment with a heated cannonball to determine how long it would have taken to cool sufficiently for life to appear on its surface.

His extrapolations from this experiment suggested it would have taken millions of years, but he thought this conclusion would prove too shocking and published in his Histoire naturelle (1749) the more modest suggestion of 75,000 years. Of course this would be no more acceptable to Christian fundamentalists, who even today support a date very close to Ussher’s and based on the same reasoning.

By the beginning of British settlement in Australia, geology had been a recognised scientific field for almost two generations and was rapidly evolving with new discoveries in chemistry, studies of vulcanology, progress in mining and the economic surge of the Industrial Revolution. In the first half of the 19th century, progress was even more spectacular with the dating of strata, the understanding of the composition and formation of different kinds of rock, the study of fossils, and estimates of the age of the earth growing ever longer, extending into the tens or hundreds of millions of years.

This exhibition begins with several geological maps of the region around Castlemaine, remarkable documents of the burgeoning scientific understanding of the time, and of the completely new models of knowledge that settlement had brought to this continent. Geological mapping was itself not possible without first establishing a topographical map, and the topographical surveying of Australia was itself an extraordinary achievement.

In this case the geologists were mainly dealing with land that had never been surveyed and thus had to carry out this task first, before they could begin to chart the distribution of geological formations.

Interestingly, the geological surveys in Victoria were begun shortly before the discovery of gold, but the Gold Rush naturally gave even more impetus to geological research and mapping.

Many samples of different kinds of rocks, collected by contemporary naturalists and geologists, attest to the 19th century passion for rocks that recalls an earlier generation’s obsession with flora and fauna. There are also Aboriginal artefacts, recalling the age-old use of stone by humans, even at very early stages of cultural development, as axes, blades and grinding tools.

G458 is by Louis Buvelot, Mt Elephant from Emu Creek (detail), 1879, courtesy Castlemaine Art Museum. Gift of Miss N McKellar 1974.

The paintings in the exhibition are not, as one of the exhibition labels admits, all overtly concerned with geological phenomena, and at first sight the omission of Von Guerard, the most explicitly interested in such matters, seems anomalous. But in fact what is revealed in this judicious selection of pictures and the expert commentary in the accompanying labels is precisely a geological reality largely invisible to the average viewer, yet perhaps dimly apprehended in an imaginative way by the artist.

The earliest work in the exhibition, Castlemaine from Ten Foot Hill (1858) dates from the period of the Gold Rush, but already reveals a landscape of abandoned pits in the foreground, with the growing city of Castlemaine in the background; the growth of civilisation is juxtaposed with evidence of its environmental cost, at least in the short term.

There is a curious detail in this painting, clearly deliberate yet not entirely clear in its intended meaning: a white and a black sheep stand side-by-side: perhaps an allusion to the hope for harmony between settlers and natives, or perhaps an allusion to the fact that many miners were adventurers and black sheep in their own families?

If there is some sense of melancholy in this picture, of a period drawing to its end, it is even more pronounced in Louis McCubbin’s Hanover Mine, Malmsbury (1916), a good illustration of the value of recovering the stories behind paintings.

The mine in the picture had been discovered in 1863, abandoned, and then reopened with fresh capital just a few years before the date of this picture; by the time McCubbin painted it, however, mining had again been abandoned and the site was about to be shut down for good. The artist follows in the footsteps of his father, Frederick, in being drawn to endings and retrospection.

The geological story behind Penleigh Boyd’s Winter calm, Frankston (c. 1920), is even more unexpected. This scene of apparent stillness and silence reveals, in the background, a geological fault line, while the tip of the headland in the distance is composed first of a basalt block which has sunk over time and then of a granite mass which has been pushed up by geological processes; the timescale and the monumental forces at work in the making of the topography we see today are incomprehensible to the human imagination, even if they can be rationally calculated.

G235 is by Arthur Streeton – Buffalo Mountains, 1913, Oil on canvas, Purchased 1942

Louis Buvelot’s Mount Elephant from Emu Creek (1879) is an expansive view with sheep grazing peacefully in the foreground; but the whole plain was once a volcanic landscape – as we also learn from the geological survey maps mentioned earlier, which reveal vast areas of granite and of volcanic formations – and the mountain is what remains of a volcano that last erupted 180,000 years ago.

More exactly, as we learn from another label, “Mt Buffalo is entirely composed of granite which formed about 350 million years ago, when hot magma cooled well below the land surface. Over the millennia all the surrounding and overlying rocks were stripped away by weathering.’’

The inescapable and almost overbearing presence of geological reality is particularly apparent in a couple of landscapes by the relatively little-known Elma Roach, but there are geological themes to be found, more unexpectedly, in the light and meditative landscapes of Clarice Beckett, as well as in various more recent works included in the exhibition, such as one by Fred Williams.

Artists who took a specific and well-informed interest in geology, like Von Guerard, were exceptional. But just as an artist can have a deep understanding of trees and their living morphology without being a botanist, painters can be closely attentive to rocks and mountains without having specialist knowledge of the science of geology.

Arthur Streeton’s Buffalo Mountains (1913) is a case in point. Streeton was not a scientist, but as the label points out, he accurately represented the characteristic forms produced by the cracking of the granite as it is almost infinitely slowly, over countless millennia, relieved of the immense weight of overlying rock. A landscape, as these pictures remind us, is made up of the inorganic as well as the organic; the painter does not need to know the causes of these phenomena but must be acutely sensitive to their effects.

Stonework, Castlemaine Art Museum to December 8.