Landscapes and traditions

R. Godfrey Rivers | England/Australia 1859-1925 | Under the jacaranda 1903 | Oil on canvas | 143.4 x 107.2cm | Purchased 1903 | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery

Gallery 10A, QAG

Queensland views

Richard Godfrey Rivers was undoubtedly the ‘father’ of art in Queensland. He became head of the Art Department at Brisbane Technical College after JA Clark’s death in 1890. Bolstered by his background at the Slade School in London and his involvement with the Queensland Art Society, he orchestrated the push to establish the Queensland Art Gallery in 1895; he then acted as the Gallery’s inaugural curator.

With training and exhibition opportunities, young Queensland artists such as LJ Harvey, Vida Lahey, Daphne Mayo, Lloyd Rees and Martyn Roberts were able to develop careers in Brisbane. Martyn Roberts later studied in Sydney with Julian Ashton, and viewed paintings by Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder. Their work informed Martyn Roberts’s Evening (Mt Coot-tha from Dutton Park) 1898. Streeton’s celebrated painting Still glides the stream and will forever glide 1890, the sketch for which is on the wall opposite, was also especially influential.

Rivers’s iconic Under the jacaranda 1903 differs from his earlier work and can perhaps be seen as a response to Martyn Roberts: contemporary critics and writers praised its ‘breadth’ and ‘force’. The intense mauve of the flowering tree, in brilliant sunlight, is in direct contrast to the evocative, twilight mood of his rival’s work.

Toowoomba-born JJ Hilder was introduced to art by James Cowan, a teacher at Brisbane Grammar School, but he took up formal studies when he also enrolled at the Julian Ashton School, Sydney, in 1906. He quickly discovered a talent for watercolour, which was confirmed by the sale of 21 works at the Society of Artists exhibition in Sydney in 1907. His career was cut short by his early death in 1916.

Symbolism and Australia

Symbolism emerged as a literary movement in France in the 1880s, but its philosophies were quickly adopted by painters, printmakers and sculptors who similarly sought to express meaning through allegory. The style, which emphasised sensuality, spirituality and the human emotions, had a broad influence internationally. It thrived in opposition to established academic and realist modes of representation, with proponents drawing on their private imaginings, mythology, medievalism and the occult. Symbolism was soon absorbed into the popular culture of the day. Its most decorative expression emerged as art nouveau – a sinuous, organic visual language, which proliferated in design, advertising and illustration.

Australian artists Bernard Hall, Rupert Bunny and Bertram Mackennal, who were working in Europe in the 1880s, and George W Lambert a decade later, each fell under the symbolist spell, at least for a time: their work helped to familiarise Australian audiences with the style. It also filtered back to Australia through the paintings of Portuguese artist Arthur Louriero, who shared a close association with symbolist artists and writers in Paris in the early 1880s, and migrated to Melbourne in 1884. However, the movement was more widely known here through magazines and journals.

The paintings and sculptures along this wall explore mythology and allegory, and moral ideals such as truth and beauty. The female figure is used to personify these qualities, or to symbolise cycles of death and renewal. Of the artists shown here, Sydney Long came closest to bridging the gap between these themes and nationalist sentiments in Australian society at the end of the nineteenth century. The nymph-like figure leading a procession of brolgas through a twilit landscape in Long’s lyrical Spirit of the Plains serves as a metaphor for the Australian bush.

Australian Impressionism

In 1885, three young artists – Frederick McCubbin, Tom Roberts and Louis Abrahams – set up a camp at Box Hill in Victoria to paint and talk about art. They shared an interest in French Impressionism, advocated painting out of doors (en plein air), and sought to capture fleeting atmospheric effects in their oil sketches. The young English artist, Charles Conder, and Arthur Streeton soon joined them. Affecting a bohemian attitude and seeking to commune with nature, the group made excursions to Mentone and other beaches in Port Phillip Bay. Camps were also held at Eaglemont and at Heidelberg – an outlying area of Melbourne from which the group derives its name.

The ‘Heidelberg’ artists defined a new direction for Australian art, drawing on familiar landscapes, glimpses of urban life and even nationalistic sentiment as nourishment for an Australian ‘school’ of painting. They frequently painted quick impressions in the field on cigar box lids (approximately nine by five inches) and other small wooden panels. In 1889, they showed these paintings in the controversial ‘9 x 5 Impression Exhibition’, the first self-consciously avant-garde exhibition held in Australia. The scale and sketchy quality of their paintings revealed a new intimacy between artist and subject, and attracted some criticism. In their defence, the artists stated:

Any effect of nature which moves us strongly by its beauty, whether strong or vague in its drawing, defined or indefinite in its light, rare or ordinary in colour, is worthy of our best efforts.

Walter Withers joined the group after the ‘9 x 5’ exhibition and, following its dissolution in 1890, continued to live in the Heidelberg area, attracting new artists to the region.

This display also includes works by artists such as Elioth Gruner and Anthony Dattilo Rubbo, which demonstrate the persistence of Impressionism throughout the early twentieth century.

In the studio

The studio is the centre of the artist’s working life. By the late nineteenth century it sheltered many different forms of practice. It was a place for socialising as well as working and was often decorated accordingly. The studio in Girolamo Nerli’s The sitting, for example, is fitted out in the popular ‘orientalist’ manner of the 1880s; Charles Conder and Tom Roberts were known for their stylish studios; and in AME Bale’s Leisure moments, the studio is decorated with the artist’s own Chinese ornaments. Young artists painted friends and family members in convivial studios like this while establishing their professional reputations.

Domestic scenes such as Bale’s or Vida Lahey’s Monday morning, indicate the great interest in contemporary life, and everyday subjects coexisted with the historical or allegorical narratives of academic and symbolist art. While Lahey’s work was not actually painted in the studio – the canvas was strapped to the mangle in the laundry – it follows the tradtition of studio painting taught at institutions such as the National Gallery School, Melbourne, where Bale, and later Lahey, studied under Frederick McCubbin.

The scale of Bale and Lahey’s paintings, and particularly of Rupert Bunny’s Bathers, reflects the continued emphasis on the competition or salon piece in the early twentieth century. Bale made hers for the National Gallery School’s Travelling Scholarship, Lahey’s was shown at the Queensland Art Society and Bunny’s at the New Salon in Paris. Bathers is more fanciful, but its figures wear contemporary clothing, connecting the painting to both modern life and the intimacy of the studio.

While plein air painting was one of the most significant developments in nineteenth-century art, and many artists whose work is displayed here painted out of doors on small portable canvases or panels, it was in the studio that they all trained.