A feast of Streeton

This is now the best book on one of Australia’s best – and best-loved – artists: Arthur Streeton, who worked in Melbourne, Sydney, Cairo, Canada, and London, and exhibited from 1884 to 1943. The National Gallery owns forty-six oil paintings, from 1884 to 1934, some being his best and most characteristic, others interesting oddities or minor pot-boilers. Of course, many of his most famous works are not here, but we see him whole. First things first: all forty-six paintings are reproduced in marvellously accurate colour, never previously achieved by other publishers. Moreover, enlarged details give an ecstatic, intimate involvement with the artist’s sensuous brush-work and his process of confident improvisation. Related pencil or pen and ink sketches, watercolours, oils, and photographs by Streeton, and by other artists, Buvelot, McCubbin, Conder, and so on, give further understanding of creative process and artistic context. View photographs and family snapshots give topographical and human context. With 130 superb illustrations it’s a visual feast. It’s also a feast of new information. Extraordinary research by the author (the National Gallery’s Senior Curator of Australian Art), by her curatorial, library, and conservator colleagues at the Gallery, by the artist’s grandson and many others, is indicated by an extraordinary bibliography. We are given corrected titles, subjects, and dates for many paintings – not only those held by the Gallery – and corrected biographical data, especially for Streeton’s movements between Melbourne and Sydney. The corrected titles and dates are often corrections to the artist’s own guesswork and second (and third) thoughts in his self-published The Arthur Streeton Catalogue, 1935, a unique marketing effort for its time, and a sign of his hero status during Australia’s extremely nationalistic inter-war years. Older artists often come to prefer more restraint; dealers and collectors have to make up bland, descriptive titles when artists’ titles are lost. Art historians always reinstate the wilder first thoughts. So Twilight pastoral 1890, a landscape with lovers, has now reverted to Above us the great grave sky (from Adam Lindsay Gordon’s Doubtful Dreams), the symbolist A bush idyll 1896 has reverted to ‘What thou amongst the leaves has never known’, and Conder’s Yarding sheep 1890 was originally The Evening Star. An uncharacteristic ‘non-subject’ sketch, a tangle of grasses, is now firmly given to Streeton, though doubted in the past. A symbolist Spirit of the Drought, recently given to Streeton, is now returned largely to Conder, though the nude spirit and swirl of flame is allowed as an addition by Streeton. The brief moment, 1888–90, which Eagle permits still to be called ‘Heidelberg School’, is deconstructed through one of its most characteristic works, The selector’s hut: Whelan on the log 1890. Whelan was not, as a reviewer said that year, ‘a selector … cutting up a fallen forest giant into posts and rails … forced by the heat to knock off work.’ Whelan was a caretaker-farmer of the house and land by the suburban railway terminus at Heidelberg where artists camped while their developer mates prepared a subdivision. The critic knew this, but colluded in city-dwellers’ mythologising of ‘the countless phases of Australian life – teamster, splitter, selector, cattle-breeder, and so on’. The picture was not of real life in the inland, but a fictional National Life. Although Eagle perhaps best loves the japoniste, eccentrically-narrow Sydney Harbour landscape panels (Sirius Cove c.1895, ‘a brilliant work of art, arguably the best he ever painted’), she does an overdue rescue job on the fluent 1920s gum-tree paintings, popular in their day but more recently despised. What Streeton called ‘towering red-gums’, she notes, which ‘more closely resemble the English oak than any other Australian tree’, the majestic eucalyptus camaldulensis of the merino heartland in Victoria’s Western District and in the Riverina, had become part of Australian popular culture. The Grampians from the Plain, a red-gum landscape with sheep, was quickly given a more general title, The sheep country, to clarify the pastoral symbolism; it became one of Streeton’s most popular works, ‘despite an unremarkable achievement as a work of art’. Reproduced with one of the three 1926 versions of another Grampians-redgums-and-merinos subject, Land of the Golden Fleece, these paintings could almost be, says Eagle, ‘illustration of J.S. MacDonald’s memorable plea’ which appeared in the Arthur Streeton number of Art in Australia in 1931: ‘If we so choose we can yet be the elect of the world, the last of the pastoralists, the thoroughbred Aryans in all their nobility.’ In Australian society in 1931 there was the smell of Hitler. Private emotions are also uncovered. Homesickness is in Sydney Harbour: a souvenir, painted in his first unsuccessful years in London perhaps out of nostalgia for neo-pagan times with the musician G.W.L. Marshall-Hall (who had the painting for a while) and the writer Sefton Delmer. The former’s poem, ‘Hymn to Sydney’, was ‘Dedicated to Arthur Streeton in his camp at Mossman’s Bay’. Nostalgia for his first moment of financial independence and consequent ability to marry, in 1908, the woman he had loved for nine years pervades In a London Garden c.1934. An imaginative extension of the small back garden at Nora Clench’s and Streeton’s St John’s Wood home, it was painted in Melbourne and is the last picture in Mary Eagle’s book. It was also the last in the catalogue of the artist’s life’s work sent to the printer in February 1935. He didn’t paint much after that. Nora suffered a stroke in 1936 and died in 1938; he nursed her, listened to classical music, read books, tended their two gardens in Toorak and Olinda. Nora’s London garden, says Eagle, had been ‘his reward. No wonder he painted it larger than life.’ A reminder of the National Gallery of Australia’s companion volumes (with a further reminder that until its tenth birthday in 1992 its name was the ‘Australian National Gallery’), Tim Bonyhady’s Australian Colonial Paintings in the Australian National Gallery 1986 has more and better information than anywhere else (except Joan Kerr’s 1992 Dictionary of Australian Artists … to 1870) about artists from Augustus Earle to Louis Buvelot. Roger Butler, The Prints of Margaret Preston: a catalogue raisoné 1987 splendidly illustrates all her 418 prints and, in a 57-page introduction and a complete list of exhibited work, including paintings, gives the best and most accurate account of her art and life. Mary Eagle, The Art of Rupert Bunny 1991, is based on even larger holdings of that artist’s work than the new book on Streeton’s paintings, and is similarly the only accurate account of his life. Michael Lloyd and Michael Desmond, European and American Paintings and Sculptures 1870–1970 in the Australian National Gallery 1992, ranges from Cézanne to Monet, Duchamp, Picasso, Matisse, Miro, and Magritte (his The Lovers 1928, at $4 million in 1991 being the Gallery’s most expensive purchase) to de Kooning, Pollock, Warhol, and Bacon; its format is larger than the others, the colour reproductions even more splendid, and its 38-page introduction is an unusually informative history of the collection, especially the politics and the money. Coming soon: Roger Butler, A history of Printmaking in Australia 1788–1994 due in 1995, and Mary Eagle, Catalogue of oil paintings by Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, E.P. Fox and G.P. Nerli in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, due in 1996.

Daniel Thomas

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