Pre-Heidelberg greatness

IT may seem early for such a nomination, but the NGV's Eugene von Guerard: Nature Revealed can perhaps already be declared the exhibition of the year.

IT may seem early for such a nomination, but the NGV's Eugene von Guerard: Nature Revealed can perhaps already be declared the exhibition of the year and, together with its outstanding catalogue by Ruth Pullin that will become an important reference book, is certainly a model of curatorial quality in Australian art history.

This exhibition also represents the culmination in a process of rediscovery and re-evaluation that has taken several decades to unfold. Like other painters of the colonial period, von Guerard was eclipsed by the success of the Heidelberg movement, which rapidly proved the most popular and successful style produced in this country.

Particularly pernicious was the lazy cliche -- still to be encountered in student essays and overheard in galleries -- that Streeton and Roberts were the first to see the Australian environment properly, while the colonial painters thoughtlessly rehearsed formulas they had brought with them from Europe.

For most of the 20th century, von Guerard's reputation was at a low ebb. In the original edition of McCulloch's Encyclopedia of Australian Art (1968), he is accorded 13 lines ("academic painter of landscape and mountain scenery"). In Robert Hughes's admittedly youthful The Art of Australia (1966) he is brutally dismissed ("indigestibly stodgy prospects of mountains and lakes"). The artist's rehabilitation began with Candice Bruce's survey that toured around Australia in 1980-81, and pre-Heidelberg painting was finally studied on its own terms by Tim Bonyhady in Images in Opposition (1985).

The great originality of the present exhibition is to restore the youth and training of von Guerard -- always a vital first step in understanding an artist, but all the more so when he is habitually imagined as permanently middle aged. Von Guerard was born in Vienna in 1811; his father Bernard von Guerard was a successful court painter who specialised in miniature portraits, his mother the daughter of an aristocratic field marshal. His parents later separated in circumstances that suggest misbehaviour on her part, and Eugene seems never to have seen her again.

In 1826, when he was 15, Eugene and his father travelled to Italy; portrait painting is an eminently portable profession. In 1830 they settled in Rome, near the foot of the Spanish Steps, in what had been an artists' quarter for centuries. Two years later, in 1832, they moved to Naples where his father died in a cholera outbreak at the end of 1836; in 1838 Eugene left Naples and, via Rome, Florence and Milan, returned to Duesseldorf where in 1840 he enrolled in the landscape course at the academy.

So contrary to the impression that von Guerard was a Germanic artist incongruously translated from central Europe to the Antipodes, the young man had actually spent 12 of the most formative years of his life in Italy, and half of them in Naples, a place incidentally that is as hot and bright as Australia.

He had been trained initially by his father, and one of the most fascinating parts of the exhibition is the comparison of the two sketchbooks used by Eugene and Bernard (in the latter's case it is the only one so far known) on a visit to Sicily in 1834. It is clear that Eugene owes his drawing style in large part to the instruction of his father, who was a meticulous and sensitive draughtsman, and with whom he had by this time been working for eight years.

Nothing is known about more formal training during the Neapolitan years, but in Rome Eugene had studied with Giambattista Bassi, then one of the highly regarded landscapists in the city. Under his tuition the young man had painted his first plein-air study, an oil sketch of the Tor di Quinto just north of Rome along the Via Flaminia, in an area regularly visited by landscape artists since the 17th century.

This little painting -- and several others that follow -- mark a direct connection between von Guerard and the plein-air oil sketching movement that had taken off in the later 18th century and which led to the increasing importance of outdoor painting in the 19th century. This connection may seem unexpected, because we usually think of Buvelot as the artist who introduced this tradition to Australia; the difference is that the neoclassical artists regarded such oil sketches as preparatory studies, while a later generation came to believe that finished work could be made outdoors and before the motif.

At the same time, Bernard and Eugene were in touch with a very sophisticated milieu of northern artists resident in Rome, several of whose works are included in the exhibition. It was indeed through their connection with the Danish neoclassical sculptor Thorvaldsen that Eugene was able to study with Bassi, and the two works by Bassi shown here were from Thorvaldsen's own collection.

Both drawings and paintings from these early years attest to an extraordinary concern for truth in the representation of nature. This predisposition, encouraged by his father and by northern contemporaries in Italy who were themselves ultimately inspired by the colossal figure of Goethe and more recently by the great scientific thinker Wilhelm von Humboldt, was only reinforced in Duesseldorf, where his time at the academy coincided with the publication of the first volumes of Humboldt's influential and popular Cosmos. Even von Guerard's decision to travel to the other end of the earth -- he arrived in Australia in 1852 -- was encouraged by Humboldt's belief that artists should seek out new lands to study and document, much like scientists. Von Guerard became, as Pullin points out, the Reisekuenstler, the "travel artist" of Australia, and it is no surprise that once here he took part with such enthusiasm in scientific expeditions to explore previously unknown inland regions of the new continent; this was his mission.

Others shared that mission, and indeed the most important scientists in Melbourne in the third quarter of the century were Germans and Humboldtians, including the great botanist Ferdinand von Mueller (known as the Humboldt of Australia), Georg von Neumayer, a geophysicist, Wilhelm Blandowski, the founding curator of the Museum of Natural History, Gerard Krefft, a zoologist, and Ludwig Becker, artist and geologist. It was with Neumayer that von Guerard travelled to Mount Kosciuszko in 1862 and made the sketches on which he based what is probably today his most famous painting, the North-east View from the Northern Top of Mount Kosciusko (1863).

In these and other drawings from the many sketchbooks included in the exhibition, we can see that von Guerard's aim was at once artistic and scientific, or rather that he and his associates saw these aims as indissociable. What is particularly striking is the concern for geology, and the interest in what Carl Gustav Carus called the physiognomy of mountain ranges.

Botany was a passion of the Enlightenment and the sciences of life are among the greatest areas of scientific discovery from the later 18th century to Mendel, Darwin and beyond. But geology too was a new field, in the sense that it was only from the time of Buffon that scientists began daring to propose that the age of the earth was vastly greater than the timespan implied by the biblical chronicles.

In the late 18th century, the eruptions of Vesuvius had stimulated the beginning of modern vulcanology, particularly in the work of William Hamilton. By the early 19th, biblical chronology and literal interpretations of the Flood story were rapidly being pushed aside by the study of geological strata. The precise study of the structure of the earth and its rocks, minerals and mountain formations was evidently fundamental to an understanding of the whole domain of nature.

Hence the way von Guerard studies mountain ranges such as the Grampians in his sketchbooks, carefully noting their profiles from different viewpoints. These are not simply attractive views, but scientific surveys in which the recording of shapes is supported by an understanding of the processes that produced such distinct morphologies.

At the same time as the views of sublime and remote scenery, Von Guerard painted numerous pictures of rural properties in Victoria -- in the exhibition the two categories are effectively set out in parallel galleries -- but he brought to these humbler subjects the same exacting standards of authenticity.

Nothing therefore could be further from the truth than the suggestion that von Guerard simply brought to Australia a set of stylistic habits adopted from German romanticism and applied them willy-nilly to what he found here. It is clear, on the contrary, that no artist has ever looked so carefully, and with more exacting standards of accuracy, at the Australian environment.

It is often complained that he did not reproduce the glare of Australian light. But this is also to misunderstand what the Heidelberg painters were doing in emphasising this kind of effect, which was something deliberately contrary to common sense. For centuries, painters had avoided painting in the midday sun, because the glare makes it hard to see and the sun directly overhead minimises the shadows that give shape to a view in the morning and afternoon.

Streeton in particular, in a certain number of pictures -- but by no means all -- chose to paint in these otherwise unfavourable conditions because the difficulty of making a picture under such circumstances paralleled the difficulty of living in this country; it was a kind of dare, and also a metaphor for an aspect of the national experience. In the context of a burgeoning national consciousness in the years before Federation, these pictures struck a particular note.

If there is a criticism to be made of von Guerard's paintings, it is not on the basis of their veracity but rather that they are constrained by their commitment to reproducing the precise form of the motif discovered in nature. Classical landscape allows itself great freedom in combining and adapting elements taken from the natural world; von Guerard's pictures are a variant on the genre of vedute or views rather than artificial landscapes; there is in fact only one picture in the exhibition based on drawings from two different spots.

Von Guerard was very successful in the 1850s and 60s and by 1870 was the head of the National Gallery School. But, as Bonyhady explains in his essay in the catalogue, his austere masterpiece, the View from the Northern Top of Mount Kosciuszko, was very badly received when first shown to the public in 1863 and failed to find a buyer.

Colonial taste was turning against art inspired by the high-minded, universal and scientific aims of the Humboldtians. It was the beginning of a long decline in von Guerard's reputation; each successive fashion in art seemed to make him more remote until the pendulum began to swing back and we recognise him today as a figure who towers above so many more ephemeral successors.

Eugene von Guerard: Nature Revealed
National Gallery of Victoria (Ian Potter Centre), Melbourne, to August 7