Now and then: what's changed since Arthur Streeton painted Sydney 130 years ago?

As a wide eyed 23-year-old artist making his first trip outside of his home state of Victoria, Arthur Streeton set sail for Sydney in 1890 with £70 in his pocket, and a plan: to paint at Coogee Beach.

Buoyed by the sale earlier that year of his first major work, Still glides the stream, and shall for ever glide, to the Art Gallery of NSW, he wanted to see for himself the city that had given him his start financially and imprimatur as an impressionist artist.

When he entered the harbour, on June 2, he was instantly smitten.

He was captivated not only by the city’s colours and light, but by the contours and curves of the coast; particularly its sandstone cliffs and coves, which would come to feature on his canvases.

Later, The Bulletin magazine would assert it was Streeton, rather than Captain Arthur Phillip, who was the [European] "discoverer of Sydney Harbour".

Although he left school at 13 and had only studied drawing at night school, the man who would become known as Australia’s most significant landscape artist loved literature and music. He would describe Sydney in lyrical letters home as a "land of passionfruit and poetry" with balmy air under "a warm palpitating sky".

He was one of the first to be able to capture that cerulean hue of the Sydney sky and sea in paint, in a colour that would later take his name: Streeton Blue.

He would describe Sydney in lyrical letters home as a “land of passionfruit and poetry” with balmy air under “a warm palpitating sky”.

On that first three-month visit, he stayed with his eldest sister, Mary (known as May), who'd married a jeweller and lived in Summer Hill. As soon as he arrived, he took the train and tram, with his easel, canvas and paints, to the north end of Coogee Beach.

He knew his good friends from Melbourne Tom Roberts and Charles Conder had painted together at this eastern suburbs beach two years before, in 1888.

Streeton painting "en plein air" at Camp Curlew.Credit: Paul Wright/Mosman Library.

Roberts had not long before returned from Europe with the then radical idea of painting en plein air as artists were doing in France, painting outdoors from nature rather than in studio from memory.

Roberts met Conder in Sydney not long after his arrival from England, and after painting at Coogee they headed south to the post-gold rush boom town of Melbourne , finding shelter at the rundown Eaglemont Homestead at Heidelberg, on the city's northeastern edge where Streeton, a fledgling 21-year-old painter, had already set himself up.

Together the artists created not only a series of celebrated works here, but also the "Heidelberg School"; the Australian version of the global movement know as impressionism. It was not only a new way of painting but a new way for Australians to see themselves and their landscape.

Arthur Streeton's Coogee Beach then, versus now. Credit: Janie Barrett

During those long hot summer days of the 1888 drought, "surrounded by the loveliness of the new landscape, with heat, drought, and flies, and hard pressed for the necessaries of life, we worked hard, and were a happy trio", Streeton wrote in Melbourne’s Argus newspaper, where he was a critic from 1929.

At night they slept on corn sacks nailed to saplings, and fuelled with claret and tobacco by the light of tallow candles, Roberts and Conder told Streeton tales of the colours of the Sydney coast around Coogee.

When he did make it to the beach in 1890, it wasn’t exactly promising. He told Roberts in a letter: "am doing a little work at Coogee, but progress is difficult; the weather has been damnable, raining all day – so monotonous and sad".

But Streeton persisted, continually returning to what was a popular leisure destination for late 19th century Sydneysiders.

"The ocean is a big wonder," he wrote in another letter to Roberts, whom he nicknamed Bulldog. "What a great miracle. It’s hard to compare it. Like death and sleep. The slow immense movement of this expanse moves one very strongly."

Wayne Tunnicliffe, head curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of NSW says: "In a sense, Streeton goes to Coogee as evidence of the friendly rivalry between him, Roberts and Conder, but also as a way to honour that close friendship."

Tunnicliffe is curator of Streeton, which opens next weekend, the most significant retrospective of this Australian impressionist’s work ever held.

It spans 60 years, from the 1880s to the 1940s, including the 1890s works of Sydney Harbour and the coast, pastoral paintings from the 1920s and ’30s, and a selection from his international career painting in Egypt, England, Italy and World War I France, where he served as a war artist in 1918.

It’s taken more than two years – complicated by COVID-19 – says Tunicliffe to gather more than 150 paintings, drawings and watercolours from 42 public and private collections around the world, some not exhibited publicly for more than 100 years. Those early Sydney paintings at Coogee were a turning point for Streeton, Tunnicliffe says.

"Coming from Melbourne, he's entranced by the ocean, the movement of the waves and the light reflecting on the water and the heat and atmosphere; it's so different from the bush he's been painting at Heidelberg and Box Hill around Melbourne. It transforms his practice. His colour experimentation just goes up a notch when it hits that bright clear, Sydney sunlight.

"It's this famous ‘Streeton Blue’ that's unleashed in Sydney; you can see it in his smaller beach scene paintings. The style is really loose and experimental. He's just pushing the paint around to get the sense of movement, reflections on the wet sand, the waves coming in, the young women he's quite entranced by with their skirts rolled up and petticoats showing. You get that feeling of his wonder in the sea, the sky and the clouds," he says.

The colour that became most closely associated with the painter born the fourth child of a school teacher in Mt Duneed, Geelong, was a sort of saturated blue with gold tones. It varied from the almost unbearably brilliant blue of midday to the soft "love-in-a-mist" blue of late evening. Beach Scene, Sunny South and Sunlight Sweet, Coogee show how "Streeton modulates the hues of the water as it recedes from the green and violet shallows of the shore to the rich blue of the open ocean", writes Denise Mimmocchi, senior curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of NSW in the catalogue for this show.

But it is The blue Pacific painted from the cliff tops of Coogee looking south, that "is testament to the new language of Sydney colour that Streeton established in his work", Mimmocchi says.

Adds Tunnicliffe: "You can see his sense of humour and whimsy in this painting, which is part of its charm." The curator points out a toy boat, a sail boat and Wedding Cake Island in the distance, and the cliffs, which are not too different today, but for a council fence protecting passersby from falling. "You get the sense of people enjoying the sense of leisure in this coastal location as we still do today."

Now worth in excess of $2.5 million, The blue Pacific became the first Australian painting to be hung in the prestigious collection of London's National Gallery in 2015; Streeton remains the only Australian thus honoured.

'From McMahon's Point - fare one penny', the only other place Streeton painted other than Coogee on his first visit to Sydney in 1890.Credit: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

"For five years it has been on display with the great French impressionist painters in a room with Van Gogh, Monet and Gauguin," says Tunnicliffe. After this Sydney show, which runs until February 14 this now-world famous glimpse of clifftop Coogee will return to its owner, Port Stephens marina owner Jeff d'Albora.

But The blue Pacific and Streeton's other Coogee paintings didn't sell at didn’t sell at his first Sydney exhibition in 1890 at the Art Society of NSW. The only work that did was From McMahon’s Point – fare one penny, the only other Sydney scene he painted before he returned to Melbourne in October that year.

But then, fleeing the Melbourne bank crash of the early 1890s, Streeton and Tom Roberts returned to Sydney in 1891,assuming there would be more cashed-up art patrons here.

"On the first night he and Roberts went straight to the steps of Town Hall to sketch passersby to earn enough cash for foor and red wine," according to family legend, says his grandson Dr Jonathan Streeton, a retired Melbourne physician. "The Sydney arts world supported him all the way through his career; Melbourne was a bit slow in appreciating him."

Jonathan Streeton as a baby in the arms of his grandfather artist Arthur Streeton, and with his mother, Margaret, in 1939.Credit: Streeton family

This second chapter of the Streeton Sydney story from 1891, where he settles under canvas in Camp Curlew on the eastern shores of Mosman Bay, is better known than his first visit. The two friends lived in tents at Little Sirius Cove, painting en plein air while a cook, Old Jules, prepared meals for them from a bush oven.

"It was a place of wild parties for these bohemian bachelors in the bush … in Sydney, as in Heidelberg, there were many parents whose daughters disappeared for a few days when they succumbed to the Streeton/Roberts charm," Dr Streeton, now 81, says of his grandfather.

"Arthur had a peaceful manner, he would retreat into his studio to paint all his life," says his grandson, who remembers as a young child visiting his grandfather at Long Acres in the Dandenong Ranges, with its garden studio and specially designed galleried music room.

Arthur Streeton's 'Fireman's funeral, George Street' (1894).Credit: Art Gallery of NSW.

Although he made his name painting outdoors, Streeton loved studio painting and would often take the ferry to the George Street studio at the Palings Building he shared with Roberts. Here he would paint many of the Sydney cityscapes he became known for, featuring the areas around Town Hall and Redfern station. He travelled to the Blue Mountains to paint one of his most famous paintings, Fire's On, at Lapstone. He journeyed to the Hawkesbury River where he painted The purple noon's transparent might at Freemans Reach, using a dead sapling to hold up the painting instead of an easel.

In 1895, Streeton painted one of his best known big works, Cremorne pastoral, as a protest painting, writes cultural historian and environmental lawyer Tim Bonyhady, in the show's catalogue.

'It was a place of wild parties for these bohemian bachelors in the bush... there were many daughters who disappeared for a few days.'

Jonathan Streeton, grandson

"He first expressed his concern for the environment when he opposed coal mining under the harbour at Cremorne – an instance of activism that Streeton looked back on with pride. He saw his intervention as a catalyst for the decision of the Sydney Harbour Collieries Company not to proceed with mining there," Bonyhady says.

The artist had already written a strongly worded protest letter to The Daily Telegraph in 1893 after test boring had been carried out in Cremorne: "It seems likely that charming Cremorne is to pass away and leave a dismal eyesore … Where once the youth with their sweethearts in white muslin gathered joyfully for merriment and sport, making Cremorne a happy pastoral, we would have instead a numerous fleet [of] grimy coal ships, hulks, smoke and darkness."

This concern for the environment continued through the latter stages of Streeton's life, when he spoke out about environmental degradation of the bush. Concern for the environment has been passed down in the family; as a lung physician, in the 1990s Dr Streeton wrote a paper about the need for national air quality standards to restrict air pollution.

Arthur Streeton and his violinist wife Nora in 1937.Credit:

In 1897, Streeton left for London and was soon experiencing a pauper painter's life at the Chelsea Arts Club, where in the early 1900s he met Nora Clench, a Canadian violinist who headed the Nora Clench Quartet. It took until 1908 for the wealthy Clench to agree to marry the relatively unknown Australian. In 1911, they had a son, Oliver, who became Jonathan Streeton's father. The artist's career flourished thanks to Nora's connections, which included stars such as Dame Nellie Melba.

In 1906, Streeton returned to Australia for a year and again painted Coogee Bay in 1907, at the exact same spot Roberts and Charles Conder had painted in 1888. [An impressionists' seat now marks the spot, just as the Curlew Camp walk from Sirius Cove to Taronga Zoo allows visitors to see the place where he painted; one of the two non-native coral trees Streeton planted at the camp still survives today.]

The Impressionists' bench at Coogee, where Roberts, Condor and Streeton painted.

After enjoying an arrival cigar and a bottle of wine with his father, Charles, at Coogee, Streeton fixed a stretcher to a tree and perched on it to paint the place he had reminisced about in letters from London.

Town Hall and Domes of the Market (1921), which Streeton painted for a friend he met in World War I.Credit: Denis Savill

"Coogee is a very jolly place," Streeton had written to fellow artist Walter Withers in Heidelberg back in 1890. "On warm days the place (which is like a nest) is filled with smiles and sweet humanity. I'll come here to die I think."

He didn’t die in Coogee, but his father, mother Mary and sister May did, and are buried in nearby Randwick cemetery. After a long, successful career, Streeton returned to Victoria in the 1920s and died in Olinda, in the Dandenong Ranges, in 1943, aged 76.

Artist Arthur Streeton's father, Charles, his mother, Mary, and sister Mary (known as May) all lived in Coogee and are buried at Randwick cemetery.Credit:

Thanks to his later artistic success and his wife Nora’s money, Streeton had bought his parents two homes in Coogee, both in Carrington Road, where they lived from 1910 until his father's death at 101 in 1930. His sister remained in Coogee until her death in 1939.

"Coogee was a special place for our family," Dr Streeton says. "Arthur obviously liked the sea, and you can see his love for it in these paintings."

Streeton is at the Art Gallery of NSW from November 7 to February 14.