The Picturesque Atlas of Australasia and history of Oz art
The main subject of a new exhibition is a remarkable publishing project, the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia.
From the beginning of printing there was a fascination with images of unfamiliar natural phenomena and topographies. The Nuremberg Chronicle, published in 1493, a sort of historical encyclopaedia of the world, was illustrated with 645 original woodcuts, including many views of famous cities. Some of these were detailed and specific, like Nuremberg itself, Rome, Florence, Venice and Constantinople, while others were generic and used several times for different cities.
At about the same time, Columbus sailed across the Atlantic to discover the existence of a completely unexpected continent. The great sea voyages of exploration of the following years began to establish, for the first time, a universal and objective map of the earth, superseding the idiosyncratic, legendary and self-centred way that other peoples had conceived of the world. Maps, too, were an important, indeed crucial, part of the history of printing.
By the end of the 18th century, trade and colonial expansion, which vastly enlarged the horizons and curiosity of new urban populations, coincided with the rise of newspapers, which began to supply information and entertainment to those populations. Printing technology, however, was for a long time fundamentally unchanged from the 15th century; in the new world of the industrial revolution, the improved steel press was developed in 1800, and by 1814 The Times in London printed its first edition on a new steam-powered press. By 1843, a much-improved American design allowed for far greater speeds and thus circulation.
Early newspapers were letterpress only, but by the middle of the 19th century there was an explosion of illustrated papers, generally weeklies, in the great capitals of the modern world. Photography had been invented in the late 1830s, and new techniques developed. But photographs could not be printed by ink in a book or newspaper press, and early photobooks were illustrated with tipped-in photographic prints. The official record of the Great Exhibition in London (1851) was produced in four volumes, bound in Russian morocco leather and included 154 hand-printed photographs.
Photogravure, the technique which would allow photographs to be directly reproduced in books and other publications, was not effectively developed until the last decades of the 19th century, and mass-circulation papers adopted the new technology in the 1890s. This was the process which produced so many handsome black and white publications in art history and archaeology between the wars and up to half a century ago. Since then most art books have been produced by a mechanical form of colour lithography.
In the meantime, the insatiable appetite for imagery of the mid-19th century public was fed by another process, which is part of the subject of a fascinating exhibition at the National Library. Ostensibly about an ambitious publishing project which is connected to one of the most important moments in Australian art history as well as to the period of Federation, this exhibition also helps us understand a crucial phase in the modern “consumption” of images that was, in its own time, as significant as the vehicles of social media have become in the past two decades.
As it happens, the process was based on a technique I described in another context a few weeks ago: wood engraving. Ever since the early days of printing, illustrations had been included in the form of woodcuts, because woodblocks and letterpress could be printed in the same frames and with the same pressure; engravings and etchings could not be used, because they require far greater pressure to force the ink out of the grooves and onto the paper.
The basic principle remained the same in the mass circulation papers of the high Victorian era. Images were still printed from woodblocks (the endgrain of boxwood), which were, perhaps surprisingly, more durable than metal plates. These blocks were sometimes based on photographs; even more importantly, by the 1860s, a photographic process was used to transfer onto the blocks designs that might originally have been drawn or executed in ink or gouache. After the transfer, however, they still had to be engraved by hand, a task requiring great skill and experience, especially as in newspapers everything has to be done under the pressure of deadlines.
The exhibition begins with displays that help us understand the process, based on material and images from one of the first great London publications, The Graphic, established in 1869 (although The Illustrated London News was even older, published from 1842). There are examples of blocks and cutting tools, as well as illustrations, from the paper itself, of its own workshops, and examples of the work produced.
One example is Frank Holl’s The Foundling (1873), a direct adaptation of Victorian moral genre painting. In the centre of the composition a policeman is carrying a swaddled infant; on the right in the background is the cowering, anxious figure of the young girl who has given birth and abandoned her child. The exhibition includes both Holl’s original drawing in pen and ink and gouache and the printed version as it appeared in The Graphic. This work, and the potential of the new medium of illustration, impressed the young Vincent van Gogh, then working for the London branch of the art dealers Goupil and Co.
The main subject of the exhibition, however, is a remarkable publishing project, the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia. To understand what this was, we need to return to the question of the demand for imagery in this period. As already suggested, this demand arose from the combination of a newly literate mass audience for newspapers and a new technology that enabled the publication of pictures as well as stories.
But the occasion of this demand for images was the expanding horizon of these mass audiences; where once only the educated or a small class of merchants and seamen would have thought much about a world beyond the immediate environment of their daily existence, now the expansion of empire and the fact that everyone had friends and relatives who had moved to settlements in the new world, ignited a widespread curiosity both about life in these European colonies and about the different peoples among whom the settlers lived. And there was a corresponding desire among the colonial peoples themselves for a record of the lives they were leading.
A series of publications arose — combining history and geography, just as in the Nuremberg Chronicle — to satisfy this demand. All of them include the word “picturesque”, mainly because the later ones follow the earlier, which is in itself an interesting fact. On the face of it, and as the publishers no doubt understood it, “picturesque” implies that a motif makes a good picture or is suitable for a picture. As it was used in the late 18th century, however, it also implied natural scenery that was wild enough to give a sense of organic life, without being as awe-inspiring as subjects classified as “sublime”.
The first of these publications was Picturesque America, which came out as a magazine series in Appleton’s Journal from 1872 to 1874, and included 900 engraved illustrations. Picturesque Europe followed from 1875 to 1879. Then Picturesque Canada appeared in 36 instalments between 1882 and 1884, and after that it was more or less inevitable that the next one would be Australia; and indeed three of the most important illustrators of Picturesque Canada moved to Australia for this project.
The Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, as it was called, came out in 42 supplements from 1886 to 1889; in other words, to the very end of the age of wood-engraved illustration. The Graphic had already begun using some early photogravures by the mid-1880s.
The project, which was inevitably very expensive, was funded by subscription. More than 50,000 subscribers paid a total of 10 guineas each in instalments over the course of the publication.
The aims of the atlas were quite ambitious, as we can see from the works included in the exhibition, including a summary of the first century of colonial history, a celebration of the beauty of the continent and its landscapes, a record of fauna and flora, and above all an account of human life in the new land.
One of the most prominent themes, not surprisingly, is the extraordinary achievement of the settlers, with the prosperous cities, ports and railways that they had built from nothing in only a few generations.
The lives of the indigenous peoples are not neglected, however. Although less prominent than in earlier colonial art, they appear in many compositions, and the publication does not shy away from acknowledging conflict. One of these, Night Attack by the Blacks, illustrates a nocturnal assault, with flaming spears, on the house of a settler family. Another image, from the history of New Zealand, is Charge of the New Zealand Cavalry at the Battle of Orakau.
Particularly interesting are illustrations of ethnological interest, of which the most striking, by F.B. Schell, a veteran of the Canadian series, documents native burial practices. The plate includes several vignettes, in one of which we see birds pecking at remains exposed on a platform built in the trees, while in another the body of a dead chief is strapped to another stick platform as though sitting cross-legged, while the body is dried and smoked by a fire below.
The latter part of the exhibition is devoted to drawings and paintings by several of the most important artists associated with the project: Julian Ashton, A.H. Fullwood and Frank Mahony. All of these artists were friends with the greater figures of Roberts and Streeton, but have become much less well-known today, although the exhibition makes a case for a renewed appreciation of their work.
Among the interesting documents in this section of the exhibition is a facsimile from the local illustrated paper, The Sydney Mail, with a selection of the pictures in the Art Society show of 1888. One of these is Charles Conder’s Departure of the Orient, Circular Quay, and another is Julian Ashton’s A Solitary Ramble. Both paintings — purchased from the show by the Art Gallery of NSW — can be found hanging nearby.
Soon after this, Ashton was instrumental in having the Art Gallery of NSW establish a watercolour prize in 1891. From the first prize, the gallery acquired A.H. Fullwood’s Kangaroo Valley and Jervis Bay and Shoalhaven River — from a viewpoint that I coincidentally visited a few months ago on Mount Cambawarra — and Ashton’s Shoalhaven River, Junction with Broughton Creek.
Ashton also helped organise important exhibitions of Australian art in Chicago, at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 — celebrating the fourth centenary of Columbus’s voyage — at which we earned three gold medals, and another even bigger exhibition in London in 1898, where British critics were not quite as enthusiastic. But in Australia, bigger matters were afoot: 1898 was the year of a series of state referendums preparing the way for Federation and the foundation of a unified Australian nation.
Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, National Library, to July 11
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