The full picture

ART history and criticism as we know them began with the tradition of artists' biographies founded by Giorgio Vasari in the 16th century.

Kangaroos painting by John Lewin

ART history and criticism as we know them began with the tradition of artists' biographies founded by Giorgio Vasari in the 16th century and developed by his successors, including Gian Pietro Bellori in Italy and Andre Felibien in the north.

Because the biographical genre included a critical assessment of the artist's character and work, Vasari generally avoided writing about individuals who were still alive -- though he made an exception for Michelangelo in the first edition and Titian in the second -- and this became a convention followed by his successors during the next couple of centuries.

Gradually, critical writing about the work of living artists developed into a separate genre. Diderot, contributing to a private newsletter in the late 18th century, was a precursor, but it was really the combination of large public exhibitions as the occasion with the new vehicle of daily newspapers that allowed it to explode in the 19th century. Art history, too, began to transcend the limits of individual biography and consider broader movements of culture and civilisation, reflecting the wider intellectual concerns of the time: in the wake of Hegel and other thinkers of the romantic period, history was no longer simply an account of contingent events, but the manifestation of a people's ethos or even the unfolding of a cosmic destiny.

Marxist historians were the heirs to the cosmic destiny model, adapted as a theory of historical necessity based on economic and social development. Individuals, in all such accounts, are less important than their social categories, classes and affiliations. The later 20th century, however, witnessed an enthusiastic renewal of artists' biographies, often in several volumes, revelling in intimate details that once were glossed over.

No doubt this interest in microscopic biography is symptomatic of the way art and artists are thought of today: in a world of extreme conformity, art has become a kind of escapist game where the most gratuitous and ostensibly shocking gestures are valued as an inversion of the utilitarian constraints of real life. The artist, too, is fetishised as a symbol of freedom in a world of economic servitude. Hence many intelligent readers are genuinely interested in wading through the most minute accounts of the life of such modern legends as Picasso.

The question one has to ask, of course, is how much this kind of information contributes to understanding what the work means, and in the end it is only the work, and the ideas crystallised within it, that matters. Ultimately, an excessive emphasis on the artist's life represents a form of the intentional fallacy, the mistaken assumption that what an artist says about their work -- what they claims it means, or even what they wanted it to mean -- is a reliable basis for determining its meaning. The truth is none of us fully knows the sense of everything we do or think; and the situation is exacerbated for the artist, who operates at intuitive and imaginative levels partly at least below the radar of rational self-consciousness.

But although exhaustive biographies may be of questionable value, some biographical information is desirable. Knowing an artist's dates allows us to situate them in history and distinguish the production of youth from that of old age. Further information may cast light on character and aesthetic choices, and reveal his connection to the social circumstances of the time. This is true, for example, of John Lewin (1770-1819), whose oeuvre and career are properly studied for the first time in an outstanding exhibition and book by Richard Neville, Mitchell librarian at the State Library of NSW.

Even for those who know something about early Australian art, Lewin is likely to be summed up by calling him the first professional artist to come to Australia as a free man, thus distinguishing him from such convict painters as Joseph Lycett. As for the work, we may know him as a painter of birds and flowers who occasionally did landscapes, and who painted, in a lecture, a picture of kangaroos that makes a telling comparison with one the great Stubbs had executed from a stuffed specimen brought back from James Cook's first voyage.

Neville has restored a full picture of a man and his time, including his artistic formation, his relations with contemporaries, and his patronage within the still very small social world of the new colony and the related question of his status within that milieu, dramatically divided as it was between convicts, free settlers of various ranks and those who considered themselves gentlemen. And he allows us to understand both Lewin's gifts and his limitations as an artist.

Lewin was the son of a natural history illustrator who enjoyed some success, although not the standing of a real scientist, a pattern repeated to some extent in John's life. His father seems to have been his first teacher, and the exhibition includes a selection of books illustrated by William, with fine images of various creatures, from birds to moths and their grubs. On some of these he may have been assisted by his son, who was still very young. After William's death in 1795, John emigrated to Australia, arriving in Sydney in 1800.

It is not surprising that a young man with this background, seeking to pursue his career and keen to work from better specimens than desiccated ones brought back to Britain from the colonies, should have thought of travelling to New Holland, as it was still known.

The colony was in its infancy and Sydney Town still consisted of a few buildings clustered around Sydney Harbour, the first ever erected on the continent. But for anaturalist, Australia represented an extraordinary source of new and unpublished material.

Natural history was the passion of the later 18th century, as the focus of scientific research moved from the fields of physics, mechanics, optics and astronomy that had been revolutionised in the 17th century to the investigation of the living world, an orientation that would soon lead to the momentous discoveries of evolution and genetics. Research in the new field had begun in Europe with the fundamental classificatory work of Linnaeus, and the collecting and sorting of specimens had become a favourite pastime among the educated classes. For a great intellectual like Goethe, botanical research, and his quest to define the ur-plant, was as important as his speculations about colour or his interest in classical literature and culture and his own poetic composition.

Clearly, however, the new world discovered and increasingly colonised by the Europeans held vast resources of new flora and fauna that needed to be studied and integrated into the recently established taxonomic systems. And while all of these lands presented new forms of life, none could equal the range and disturbing unfamiliarity of those in Australia.

Barron Field, the dedicatee of Charles Lamb's wonderful essay, Distant Correspondents, suggested in his poem on the kangaroo (1819) that Australia appeared as an "after-birth" following the fall of man rather than during the six days of creation. Even today there are biblical fundamentalists who fret about how kangaroos and koalas got on to Noah's ark and then migrated to the antipodes afterwards.

By far the most interesting thing about Australia in the early years of colonisation was its abundance of surprising new plants and animals. Later artists would make landscape painting the central Australian genre as they pondered the longer-term question of inhabiting the land, but the earliest ones were more concerned with the various aspects of exploration and colonisation, and audiences in Britain and Australia were as interested in pictures of plants and animals as in views of the growing colonial towns.

Thus although natural history painting was considered a specialist activity distinct from the higher ambitions of history or landscape painting, it was close to the interests of contemporary audiences and in the particular setting of Sydney Town could even assume the role of fine art. Lewin, as we see, painted bigger and more elaborate versions of flowers, birds, lizards, koalas or kangaroos destined for sitting-room walls as well as designing illustrations intended for natural history volumes. And visitors to the colony, such as commissioner John Bigge who was sent out to inquire into Lachlan Macquarie's administration, would collect such works as souvenirs of their visit as naturally as they might acquire vedute of famous spots on a voyage to Italy.

Consequently, Lewin found a succession of patrons in Sydney, including William Paterson, captain of the NSW Corps and lieutenant-governor of NSW, but a naturalist at heart and a regular correspondent with Joseph Banks. He accompanied Paterson on his exploration of the Hunter Valley in 1801, and there is a charming picture of the two of them sitting under a makeshift shelter in front of a blazing fire, preparing some of the birds they had shot as specimens.

He was also employed by a succession of governors, including Richard King, who replaced Hunter in September 1800, William Bligh (1806-08) and, above all, Macquarie (1810-21). Macquarie appreciated Lewin's abilities and in order to give him financial security appointed the artist as coroner of Sydney Town in 1812, doubling his salary in 1813. Holding such an administrative office also allowed Lewin, whose social origins were modest, to consider himself a gentleman and to style himself Esquire, as he is also called on his tombstone.

Lewin's publishing ventures, like so many others, met with mixed success, but it is his achievement as an artist that is particularly the subject of the exhibition. His views of the country -- among the very earliest -- are fresh and sensitive to the qualities of Australian flora, light and space. This feeling for the Australian environment is also an important part of his work in natural history images, and he was apparently the first naturalist to depict living creatures in their natural settings.

As a natural history illustrator, Lewin could not compete with the microscopic eye and masterful hand of Ferdinand Bauer, the Austrian artist who accompanied Matthew Flinders and was in Sydney between 1803 and 1805. His strength is in a sense of the life and character of his subjects, particularly birds. The quadrupeds and even koala are rather wooden, but the birds always seem to be in movement, charged with the spring of action. This may seem surprising, for birds are so quick in their nervous movements, so hard to capture in drawing unless the artist has a particular imaginative affinity with them. It is the work itself that gives us, in the end, the most suggestive insight into the artist's character.

J.R. Lewin: Painter and Naturalist
State Library of NSW, until May 27