Nicholas Chevalier saw Australia through cosmopolitan eyes

THE tyranny of distance has not always been felt equally by artists working in this country.

Nicholas Chevalier

THE tyranny of distance, in the memorable phrase coined by Geoffrey Blainey and used as the title for one of his volumes of Australian history (1966) has not always been felt equally by artists working in this country.

In fact it was most severely experienced from the postwar years to the 1970s, when many Australian artists scrambled anxiously to copy overseas fashions and uncritically aped whatever they were told was avant-garde

Although they were inevitably influenced by European contemporaries, the Heidelberg painters felt no such need to monitor their work against overseas trends. Addiction to fashion, indeed, had not yet become the general condition of contemporary art. On the contrary, they travelled back to the metropolitan centre in the hope of making an impression there.

London was a competitive city for an artist hoping to establish a career, but it was not perceived, as New York later was, as a source of oracular and unforeseeable artistic decrees which could consecrate a new artistic movement or consign one to irrelevance.

For earlier colonial artists Australia's distance had an entirely different meaning again: it was a long way from Europe, to be sure, but Augustus Earle, Conrad Martens, Abram Louis Buvelot and to a lesser extent Eugene von Guerard were widely travelled. There was nothing parochial about these artists, who came here after often extensive travels and periods of foreign residence, sometimes in the more exotic parts of the colonial world.

Their national origins were diverse too: Buvelot came from Switzerland, and von Guerard was born in Austria. And yet, cosmopolitan and sophisticated as they were, they learnt to speak of the experience of their adopted land, even when it was only temporarily adopted; in fact one can go further and say that all of them -- like John Glover before then and Charles Conder later -- became greater artists as a result of the Australian experience and did their best work in this country.

This may also be true of Nicholas Chevalier, although the current exhibition at Geelong and the accompanying catalogue -- the first proper survey of his oeuvre -- only cover the Australian years and so do not allow us to make a proper comparison with his earlier and later production. The exhibition itself is modest in size but well-chosen and offers a broad enough sample of Chevalier's work to form a balanced impression of his abilities.

Chevalier was born in St Petersburg, where his Swiss father was the administrator of the estates of Prince Wittgenstein, aide-de-camp to the tsar. He was educated in St Petersburg and Lausanne, and not surprisingly grew up fluent in several languages and at ease in any social situation; he later struck up a friendship with Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, and accompanied him on his travels before returning to London to be introduced to Queen Victoria.

It was not by choice but for family business reasons that Chevalier came to Australia in 1854; he had to attend to an important timber investment that belonged to his father. But once here he quickly established himself in the social life of Melbourne, as well as the professional worlds of art, painting Victorian landscapes -- he and von Guerard became friends -- and journalism, contributing illustrations to Melbourne Punch (1855-61).

Chevalier was successful in all these undertakings, and in 1864 won an acquisitive prize for an Australian landscape with a large picture that remains his most famous: The Buffalo Ranges, which duly entered what is now the National Gallery of Victoria collection. A decade later, in 1874, the gallery published a series of photographic reproductions of important works in its collection, and two Australian works were chosen: Buvelot's Waterpool near Coleraine (1869) and Chevalier's The Buffalo Ranges.

But Chevalier's success was popular rather than critical. Redmond Barry, chief justice, chancellor of the new university and chairman of the public library, which still included the Museum of Art, and chairman of the selection committee that awarded Chevalier the prize, thought the picture "the best of a very poor lot indeed" and seems to have requested some "improvement" which the artist agreed to make. Barry also noted that von Guerard had not submitted a picture, implying that he would have been a superior candidate.

Marcus Clarke, who wrote the text for the photographic publication, considered that Chevalier "lent himself readily to satisfy popular taste", and the exhibition does nothing to dispel such reservations about the work. The first landscapes we encounter, on the right as we enter, dissolve into a sentimental pink glow which has nothing in common with what one assumes to be Chevalier's model in Turner's sublime luminosity and still less with the latter's own model in Claude Lorrain's infinitely subtle effects of light and space.

We all know the difference between someone speaking impressively and speaking with the intent to impress. We recognise the difference, too, between a film that is genuinely moving and one that systematically pushes the buttons of conditioned responses. It is the same with all art: real conviction comes from the crystallisation of perception, not from the deliberate pursuit of effect.

This is Chevalier's weakness, although he is, in this respect, also succumbing to the ethos of his time, for Victorian art, largely addressing a new audience of half-educated middle-class viewers, was sentimental and addicted to superficial effect. And he is capable of succumbing to popular taste in this way because he is not a great artist, or even a serious one, in the sense that he has any intuition he wants to convey badly enough to resist the siren call of short-term success.

It is not that Chevalier lacked talent. If today you discovered a boy or girl at art school who could paint a picture like the little sketch of crashing waves at Cape Schanck in the Art Gallery of NSW, you would consider him or her a prodigy. It has freshness, economy and flair. And throughout the exhibition we find a talent that is never less than workmanlike and often attractive in places.

The trouble is that he doesn't progress beyond this base or even stick to it; time and again he resorts to facile and evidently crowd-pleasing effect. The most useful aspect of this exhibition, indeed, is that it allows us to compare successive versions of the same motif. Thus the beautiful little study Pulpit Rock, Cape Schanck (1862), has all the freshness of plein-air execution, and at the same time a harmony and wholeness that come from the time and place itself.

The deep blue of the sky complements the deep green of the sea and both harmonise with the dark mass of the rocks; the light cool sky and the frothy white of the waves form a strong tonal contrast with these darks. The later painting of a nearby subject, Castle Rock, Cape Schanck (1865) is more insubstantial, the tonal structure weaker, because the artist has sought to create an overall, but artificial effect of illumination. A yet later version of this second subject, meanwhile, Cape Schanck, Victoria (1872) is weaker still: the sea has nothing of the darkness and vigour of the 1862 painting, and the sky is dressed up with a pink sunset.

This is not an isolated case. There are similarly two versions of Mount Sturgeon (early morning), both in 1862. In the first, presumably done or at least begun en plein air, there is a strong and clear apprehension of the motif; the forms of the mountain are carefully and decisively rendered -- even if not with the same laser-like capacity for attention that von Guerard brings to such a motif -- and once again the colours are fresh and the tonal structure strong. But if we turn to the finished picture, now twice as big, all this vanishes: the early morning effect has been exaggerated, giving the whole picture a cloying flavour; colour is falsified in the process and because everything is in a higher key, the tonal structure of the composition has been vitiated.

The relation between these plein-air sketches and the subsequent versions is not, incidentally, analogous to that between the sketches and finished paintings by Constable or Corot. It is not a matter of transforming a sketch into a more artificial or elaborate composition; indeed Chevalier could have done well to work a bit harder on his compositions, as Buffalo Ranges makes clear.

Perhaps the first thing that strikes us is the rather inept spatial composition which has us looking down on the road in the foreground instead of out into the view. Equally unfortunate is the displeasing conjunction of sentimental, anecdotal foreground and sublime background. It is like a pastiche of the intimate and close-up views of nature of the Barbizon type, often including roads winding into woods as we see here, that would soon be popularised in Australia by Buvelot (who arrived in Australia early in 1865), and von Guerard's grand and distant mountainscapes. What is going on with the human figures and the oxen and dray, meanwhile, seems not to have been properly thought out.

This combination of woods in the foreground and snowcapped mountains in the background recurs elsewhere in Chevalier's work, and reaches what can only be called its chocolate-box consummation in Looking toward Mount Kosciuszko (1866); the shortcomings of this work are cruelly apparent if we set it beside von Guerard's austere and uncompromising version of the subject three years earlier, in North-east view from the northern top of Mount Kosciusko (1863).

The difference between these artists is that one has a distinctive vision of the world, and the other manipulates elements to evoke certain responses in the viewer. But vision is not a matter of mystical inspiration: it is partly a matter of hard work and certainly it comes from attention and intelligence.

It is the relentless quest for truth that uncovers the wellsprings of poetry, while the pursuit of effect inevitably leads to kitsch. Significantly, only in the straightforward plein-air sketches does Chevalier ever discover a grain of poetic insight.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue raisonne of Chevalier's work in Australia which will be valuable as a reference work. The text, however, is less notable for critical judgment and often poorly written: thus we read that Chevalier's father "deigned to allow" his son to travel to Italy, that the artist "remained loyal to an idiosyncratic approach" -- presumably the author means personal -- and, in a memorable malapropism, that he "spurned an industry of amateur landscape painters".

Nicholas Chevalier: Australian Odyssey
Geelong Art Gallery to February 12