Capital and Country exhibition explores the novelty of a nation

THIS travelling exhibition, mounted by the National Gallery of Australia, begins with the inauguration of the new Commonwealth of Australia in 1901.

Penleigh Boyd's The Canberra Site (1913). From the exhibition Capital and Country, Ballarat Art Gallery, Ballara...

THIS travelling exhibition, mounted by the National Gallery of Australia and devoted to Australian painting in the years after Federation, begins appropriately with the inauguration of the new Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. There is a vivid oil sketch, probably painted on the spot, by Frederick McCubbin, which records the temporary triumphal arch erected on the Princes Bridge in Melbourne to celebrate the event.

Such temporary structures, alluding to the triumphal arches, such as those of Septimius Severus or Constantine, that still survive in Rome and elsewhere, had been erected ever since the Renaissance to mark the visits of kings and emperors to great cities. In this case it was to honour the visit of the duke of Cornwall who, after the death of his father Edward VII - for whom the bridge had been named in 1888 - would become King George V, the ruler of the British Empire during World War I.

The opening of the first parliament of the Australian Commonwealth by the duke is the subject of a commemorative painting by Tom Roberts, who by then had established himself as Australia's pre-eminent artist, one who - unlike Arthur Streeton - possessed the skills in figure painting and portraiture essential for such a commission. The enormous composition, which was completed in 1903 and hangs in Parliament House, is not included in the exhibition but is represented by three works that give different impressions of the occasion.

The first is Roberts's own oil sketch, which is full of energy and captures, in its dramatic and almost sacramental illumination, much of the excitement of what must have been, for those present, a solemn and moving occasion. But then this elemental vision of the genesis of a new nation had to be translated into something infinitely more prosaic: a mosaic of portraits of all the dignitaries present at the time - the terms of the commission, indeed, specified a minimum of 250. It was, in this respect, an even more demanding task than Jacques-Louis David's Coronation of Napoleon (1805-07), which, just less than a century earlier, also had required an anthology of relevant portraits.

One little oil sketch is shown as an example of the task that awaited Roberts. It is a lively and spontaneous likeness of JT Walker, a Scottish-born banker and senator for NSW. But there were countless others, each of whom would require a sitting, and some of whom Roberts had to seek out in London.

Worse, perhaps, or at least more frustrating than this painstaking collection of likenesses, was the difficulty of assembling them all into a composition. As the large but still much reduced photogravure of the finished work reveals, he was more successful on the left-hand side, where there was a certain amount of space and the architectural frame helped to structure the composition.

On the right, almost inevitably, the picture becomes little more than a collage of portrait heads, the monotony mercifully relieved here and there by a cardinal's scarlet or a judge's full-bottom wig. In the centre of the composition, modestly below the monarch's representative yet directly facing him and distinctly profiled against the hazy white dresses behind him, is our first prime minister, Edmund Barton.

The federal parliament was opened in Melbourne, but the perennial rivalry between our two greatest cities meant that its permanent site could be neither there nor in Sydney but somewhere in the middle. A place that was sufficiently nowhere in particular was identified by 1908, and in December 1912 a competition was announced to paint a topographically accurate view of the site before development began.

This was in itself a singularly interesting decision, demonstrating historical and environmental self-consciousness: the original state of the site was to be recorded - and not just with the cold objectivity of the photograph but with the aesthetic sensibility of painting - before its radical transformation began. There were a dozen entrants; in the end, the prize was won by W. Lister Lister, and a second prize was awarded to Penleigh Boyd, each of whom painted the view, in the early summer of 1913, from slightly different angles.

Both pictures were acquired by the commonwealth at the time and are included in the exhibition. They reveal a broad but nondescript area of land with almost no distinctive features, an effect exacerbated by the midday lighting effectively required in the terms of the commission. It is a blank canvas for an architectural vision, but a site that would have been unbearably claustrophobic without the lake.

Odd as it may seem, the great burst of energy in Australian painting associated with the broader period of Federation belongs to the decade and a half before the event itself. The greatest works of the Heidelberg School, the movement that most clearly articulates a new national consciousness, were painted between about 1885 and 1895.

By 1897, Streeton had set off for Europe, and Roberts followed him in 1903. George Lambert and Hugh Ramsay, coincidentally, sailed to England on the same ship in 1900 and the younger Hans Heysen was sent off to pursue his studies, supported by a group of four Adelaide businessmen, in 1899.

The painting that actually took place in Australia in the Edwardian years between Federation and the outbreak of World War I was rather subdued compared with the energy of the late 19th century. Examples include two large late pictures by McCubbin, one of a young boy who has slipped through a broken fence to play by a small stream - less an image of colonial fears about children lost in the bush than a nostalgic reflection on the loss of intimacy with nature in Australia's ever more urbanised population - and another of a rainbow over flooded country near McCubbin's own home.

There is a small painting of a young man with an axe over his shoulder by Percy Leason (1914), that is especially interesting for his treatment of a subject that had been symbolically charged in colonial and Heidelberg painting. The axe had been, notably, a significant motif in Louis Buvelot's Waterpool near Coleraine (1869) and had been used programmatically in Streeton's The Selector's Hut (1890), in which it stands as a metonymic sign of the honest labour by which the selector has legitimised his place in the land; and it was quoted from both works by McCubbin in his triptych The Pioneer (1904), which retrospectively, and significantly several years after Federation, summed up the movement.

Outside the exhibition, but in the permanent collection at Ballarat, the axe is also the subject of one of Roberts's greatest celebrations of rural labour, Charcoal Burners (1886) - a more modest painting but also a more spontaneous one than the better-known Shearing the Rams (1889-90).

In a forest clearing, two men chop timber for charcoal burning while a third pauses to take a drink from a bottle. The attitudes of the two axemen are carefully chosen to illustrate successive phases of the chopping action, thus achieving an effect of animation by a device that goes back to Raphael.

Looking at Leason's painting with such works in mind, we can see that he appears to express nostalgia for rural manual labour, and perhaps specifically for the pioneering figure of the selector. But his protagonist, a pale and pasty youngish man with an axe balanced on his shoulder and no action of any kind, is all too clearly a model, and the young artist was probably not capable of endowing him with motion, since that cannot be copied directly from a static model but is a skill acquired from many years of studying and observing the human body in action.

The most powerful of our painters, as already mentioned, had left Australia by this time, which may seem surprising at first sight. But all our earlier artists had come here from Europe in the first place, and now that we were producing an increasing number of native artists, we were simply reversing the pattern and sending them back to Europe for what we would now regard as postgraduate training.

Even Streeton, whose special status in the mythology of Australian art arose largely from the fact he was the first important artist to have been born and trained here, left for Europe to learn as well as to try to succeed in a bigger metropolitan and international sphere. It is generally felt that the work he did there was no match for his Australian pictures, but the two paintings included in the exhibition are perfectly presentable.

There is a little view of the mouth of the Grand Canal in Venice, with the Dogana and the dome of Santa Maria della Salute (as well as the corner of the Library of Sansovino), but it cannot have been painted from the Bridge of Sighs, as asserted on the label; rather from the parallel bridge on the Riva degli Schiavoni between the Doge's Palace and the Piombi, where Casanova and others were imprisoned.

More impressive as a painting is Hampstead Heath from Jack Straw's Castle (1901-08), a little picture that often looks grey and gloomy in reproduction but that, though almost monochrome, is full of subtle luminosity, the dark trees in the centre of the composition silhouetted against the wintry brightness of the sky.

Other artists are better known as longer-term expatriates, including Rupert Bunny, Ramsay, Violet Teague - represented here by her most memorable picture, The Boy with the Palette (1911), a full-length portrait of Theo Scharf, a precociously talented young painter and later a printmaker - and Lambert, whose enigmatic composition The Sonnet (c. 1907) seems to be yet another expression of his intense but probably platonic relationship with the beautiful Thea Proctor.

Many of these artists are inspired by the example of Velazquez, who had been effectively rediscovered by Manet as a powerful example for modern painting, and in a sense an alternative classical tradition, one that had not been appropriated by the Academic schools. Max Meldrum was another important figure drawing on the same source, as well as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot for landscape.

It is important to recognise that these painters considered themselves to be working in a modern idiom, even though they were in active contact with an earlier tradition; the later 20th century was inclined to consider them pre-modernist, but that is because modernism subsequently came to be defined by a rejection of tradition.

An assumption of rupture, in the ideology of modernism, replaced the earlier assumption of continuity. Today we find ourselves at the end of the myth of rupture, which is why we are rediscovering these artists and writing them back into the story of art; we have realised that there is no end of history, no absolute originality or novelty, but we have not yet quite come to terms with the need to rediscover continuity, tradition and memory.

Capital and Country, Ballarat Art Gallery, Ballarat, Victoria, to January 19