Caught by the camera - Piguenit and the rise of photography

WILLIAM Charles Piguenit's masterpiece is a synthesis of impressions the artist encountered on his adventures in the remote uplands of Tasmania.

WC Piguenit's A Mountain Top, Tasmania (c. 1886)

WILLIAM Charles Piguenit (1836-1914) was said by William Moore, an early historian of Australian art, to be the first native-born professional artist in this country, while fellow historian and critic Bernard Smith pointed out that he was also the last of our colonial artists.

As to his Australian pedigree, not only was he born in this country but to a convict father transported for receiving stolen government property, although Frederick Le Geyt Piguenit - the French name reflecting his Huguenot origins - came from a respectable family and conducted himself in an exemplary manner after his arrival in Hobart.

The girl to whom he was already engaged to be married, and who soon joined him in Tasmania, was a cultivated young woman who set up a school in the colony, teaching English, French, music and drawing, among other subjects; it was undoubtedly she who first taught their son William to draw. Later he took lessons with a Scottish painter called Frank Dunnett, but was largely self-taught as a fine artist.

In 1850, the young Piguenit found employment as a draughtsman in the surveyor's office in Hobart, a position that gave him the opportunity, in the early 1870s, to take part in three expeditions exploring and mapping the inland regions of the island. Like other high colonial artists inspired by late romanticism, he was drawn to remote and dramatic landscapes, often never before seen by Europeans - and therefore never actually considered as landscapes - that seemed to express the spirit of the new land.

Piguenit was so fascinated by these sites that he resigned his position at the surveyor's office in 1874 - with no pension or termination payment until this ingratitude was raised in the press and eventually remedied by the colonial legislature - to devote himself entirely to painting, and it his subsequent development as an artist that is documented in the valuable exhibition at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, accompanied by a beautifully produced and scholarly book by Sue Backhouse.

The artist's fairly swift progress, from relatively amateurish beginnings to confidence and fluency, can be followed in the first few works in the exhibition, although there is no great development in depth thereafter. The impression on looking around the room, in fact, is of a highly competent painter with a refined if somewhat timid sensibility - perhaps reflecting the character of the man himself - producing attractive and popular images that remain, however, haunted by the contemporary rise of photography.

Oddly enough, Piguenit's work appears more refined in the book than in the exhibition. This is a bad sign, for it is almost always true that good art looks better in reality than in reproduction, which can never do justice to its complexities; and poor art looks better in reproduction because its blandness is less apparent in condensed form. Here, though, the work looks better partly because so many reproductions concentrate on sensitively rendered details while the whole compositions are often rather flat, and partly because the book reproduces so many beautiful and sensitive plein-air studies from the artist's sketchbooks.

In the exhibition, a central cabinet is filled with leaves from a sketchbook recording a trip in 1900, late in the artist's life, around the hills and lakes of Wales. They are filled with delightfully fresh and vivid observations of general views and of details of landscape from trees to cattle - there are indeed a couple of pages covered in little watercolours of cows of different breeds and in different attitudes as they graze in the meadows.

It may seem something of a cliche of art criticism to say these studies are livelier than most of the finished paintings on the walls, for this was a regular modernist complaint about such masters as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and John Constable. But the objection in these cases was to the alleged artificiality and conventionality introduced in the transition from study to exhibition picture, the casualness of the former being more congenial to modernist taste. Here, though, it is rather a different matter: the problem lies not so much in the gratuitous imposition of compositional structure as the lack of such a structure.

But even before we come to this specific question, there is a certain want of rigour in Piguenit's vision. For all his love of the grand and sublime spectacle of wild nature, he lacks anything like Eugene von Guerard's scrupulous attention to geological form. His rocks and mountains are imposing silhouettes, but they are not much more than that; they have no spine, little inner form. And at the same time his treatment of sky, water and clouds is ultimately facile: light effects are more often obvious than subtle, and the surface of the broad expanses of water of which he is so fond frequently have a disagreeably bland and almost airbrushed quality.

Piguenit shares some of these faults with Nicholas Chevalier, but the cases are not exactly the same. Chevalier can be obvious to the point of vulgarity, revelling in showy effects of light and chocolate-boxy compositions designed to impress an undiscriminating public. Although Piguenit is also making pictures that are capable of appealing to a rather unsophisticated taste - while I was there several visitors glanced at the show for a distressingly short minute or so, ritually observing that the pictures were beautiful, before instantly departing - he is clearly not vulgar but rather, if anything, overly sensitive and fairly passive in his response to picturesque detail.

But painting is not just a matter of receptivity and sensibility; it also requires the decisive, assertive imposition of order that is the essence of composition. Ultimately, indeed, composition must precede observation - that is, one must have an idea of what kind of a thing a picture is before one begins to look at the world and set down its appearances, just as one must have an idea of what a story is, or what the composition of a piece of music entails.

Of course, Piguenit was not completely without ideas about the nature of pictures, but partly because he was not properly taught within a tradition, he did not assimilate a deeper understanding of the nature of landscape as an artificial construction. His sense of landscape was derived from those he could see around him, and no doubt - as I have already hinted - by the new technology of photography, which had already had an insidious influence on other contemporary landscapists (we know he took 12 photographs on the 1873 expedition, for example).

Where the impact of photography is most apparent is in his absence of foregrounds. Within the tradition of landscape painting, a picture has a foreground, middle ground and background in the same way that a story has a beginning, a middle and an end.

This is one of those axioms of composition that, as just mentioned, logically precedes even the observation of nature, not because nature always provides these distinct elements, but because without them the world cannot be made into a picture.

In fact nature tends not to offer a happy sequence of planes in an ideal composition, any more than the incidents of everyday life arrange themselves in the satisfying completeness of stories. This should not be a surprise; we look at nature not to find compositions but to encounter life, space and light; composition is what the artist supplies. But the problem is that the camera, unless used by an artist aware of the artifice of pictorial composition, will not invent a foreground. In most cases, beguiled by what seems to be a spectacular view and naively thinking this enough in itself, the photographer makes an image completely lacking in foreground.

And this is exactly what we find in most of Piguenit's paintings: either a perfunctory foreground - a bit of a beach or a few wisps of scrub - or none at all, and then a broad body of water leading out to a mountainous view in the background.

Ostensibly, the pictures are all about vastness, distance and sublime grandeur; in reality, however, they are almost completely flat. There is no depth, no space, because space in a composition is something that can be conjured up only in the interval between a foreground and a background, just as a highlight in painting can be made to seem bright only by contrasting it with surrounding shadow and darkness.

The failure to understand composition becomes even more striking in some of the bigger late pictures, done at a time when the rise of the Heidelberg painters had made Piguenit's style seem old-fashioned and even provincial, and yet when he was simultaneously seeking to affirm his importance in larger works. One of the weakest is also his biggest, the Mount Kosciusko (1903) in the Art Gallery of NSW, although in fairness that gallery also holds one of his better pictures, The Flood in the Darling (1895). In the present exhibition, the large vertical canvas of the Hawkesbury is a spectacularly bad composition, with its yawning gap on the lower left in which disconnected treetops serve only to emphasise the lack of any ground, while the hill thrusts up excessively on the other side, cramping the vista of the river at the upper right.

In contrast, there is fortunately one picture that is a truly memorable image and, one may say without exaggeration, a masterpiece of 19th-century Australian painting. Significantly, A Mountain Top (c. 1886) is also not a picture of a particular spot, but a work of the imagination, a synthesis of different powerful impressions encountered on the artist's adventures in the remote uplands of Tasmania.

Here for once he could not be satisfied, or imagine that his audience would be satisfied, with a photographic composition - or even, conceivably, consider such flatness as evidence of veracity in its very lack of artifice - and instead he creates a real composition.

There is a foreground that runs around into the massive and almost surreal group of rocks in the centre, and these rocks are in the middle ground, close enough to be dramatic, to involve the viewer, instead of being in a background so far away they become remote.

The presence of a foreground and its continuity into the middle ground create the space that is absent or only feebly suggested in almost all the other pictures - a space into which the viewer can enter in imagination and be moved by the almost disturbing spectacle. The background assumes the subsidiary role it should have as foil to the main motif, and because it is luminous, vaporous and indeterminate, it evokes the sense of an infinite beyond. The overall effect is melodramatic, but the conviction with which it is painted makes us believe this is indeed a vision, and, more important, a successful painterly expression, of the sublime.

A Passion For Nature: The Work Of William Charles Piguenit,Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, to June 30