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In the round-up session of the "Australia: Land and Landscape Symposium" I had a query about a point made by Andrew Wilton in his talk on "Australian sublime".
He had said that Glover was noted for his disciplined observation of nature and its accurate representation. I would not disagree. But are "the serpentine curves of the gum trees" in Glover's paintings really that accurate?
Ron Radford also remarked that Glover was noted for his Claudian landscapes before he migrated to Australia, but that he became remarkably realist once in Australia, his trees being distinctly recorded.
I well remember that in the 1990s many Australian art historians, when discussing the landscapes of European colonial period painters, would argue that Glover's gum-trees were exaggerated in their sinuousness.
An example:
"The sinuosity of gum trees, which although the gums of Mills Plains do exhibit this tendency, is an obvious exaggeration and a weakness of the larger landscapes" (John Glover, John A. McPhee, 1977, p. 60).
Another example, on Glover's sketches for "A Corrobee: of Natives near Mills Plains":
"Glover has, in sketch number 14, anthropomorphised the tree, imbuing its limbs with a Medusan quality so that they writhe like snakes...serpentine branches become a distinguishing feature of his Aboriginal landscapes." Ian McLean, in John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque, 2003, p.128.
A further example:
"He was an acute observer of the Tasmanian landscape, and yet his compositions always balance the explorer's interest in the exotic- he was evidently so struck by the sinuous curves of the eucalyptus that his trees have a strange and rather eery animation- with an uncomplicated sense of being at home, embodied in the peaceful cattle grazing beneath those trees". Christopher Allen, Art in Australia, From Colonization to Postmodernism, 1997, p.28.
Tim Bonyhady discusses the matter in Images in Opposition, Australian Landscape Painting, 1801-1890 (1985, pages 118-119):
"Glover was the first artist to be preoccupied with the shape of the eucalypts. Although he captured the openness of these trees, Glover always rendered them more picturesque by exaggerating their sinuous structure".
He goes on to say that many colonists were nevertheless struck "by the accuracy with which he depicted the eucalypts". "Masterly", "incomparable", was the view of one visitor to Glover's home. A newspaper critic, writing about Glover's sketchbooks, praised the trouble Glover had taken to acquire the knack of drawing gum trees, "with their gnarled trunks and curling snaky branches".
In the introduction to his book (p. xi), Bonyhady reviews the literature on Australian landscape painting:
"In much of this literature, especially that dating prior to 1945, the dominant issue has been the success or failure of the artists in conveying the shape of eucalypt trees and the sharpness of Australian light...commentators in the late nineteenth century rejected the work of most colonial artists as tarnished by their European training and from early in the twentieth century increasingly came to see Tom Roberts and his associates as the first artists who had truly rendered Australian scenery".
Australian art critics have often suggested that early European or British painters visiting or living in Australia (whether as convicts, officials or settlers) found it difficult to come to terms with the Australian light and landscape, seeing and perceiving nature and composing landscapes under the influence of Claude Lorrain and others, and thus failing to represent it accurately or with innate, native-born sympathy. They would impose or unconsciously superimpose an English sense of order, for instance.
This view seems to have been taken on board by current British critics and art historians (and not just about colonial era painters), at the same time that Australians appear to have changed their minds.
Waldemar Januszczak writes: "With much overuse of Courbet's palette knife, the Dorset-born Roberts managed to make the coast at Mentone look passably like the landscape at Weymouth" (The Sunday Times Culture Magazine, 22 September, 2013).
Apparently Glover's sinuous and serpentine eucalyptus trees are now considered to be extremely faithful and unexaggerated representations of the gums in the area where he was painting in Northern Tasmania. This seems to be the view of Angus Trumble, an expatriate Tasmanian art-expert, currently Senior Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Centre for British Art, who was at the symposium.
Ian Henderson of the Menzies Centre agreed with me that in the recent past a common Australian critique of colonial painters' depiction of eucalyptus trees and other Australian fauna and flora was indeed close to my recollection (and readings) of prevailing opinion at the time.
I haven't studied the eucalypts in the north of Tasmania. Whether the branches and trunks are exaggerated by Glover or not, it is still possible to argue, as John McPhee does, that an exaggerated feature can be used in compositions "as a formal constructional element and in some cases for its expressive qualities" (1977, p. 60).
Either way, Glover can be praised for his accurate representation and interpretation of nature.
A small issue, perhaps, but one which exposes some enduring post-colonial national sensitivities in both countries.
In his foreword to the magnificent "John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque" (David Hansen et al) 2003), Robert S McKay writes: "Through it we can experience the first sustained transformations of European landscape conventions towards a vigorous and uniquely Australian vision".
See this posting on A corroboree of natives in Mills Plains, 1832
"The giant native tree, silhouetted against the sky, is bent and dying as the sun sinks, and so becomes a metaphor for the fate of the ancient race".
A friend in Australia sent some feedback on this posting, saying that he'd always thought the key aspect of Glover's work was 'the fictional presence of his Aborigines'. Tony Bonyhady commented that the paintings of early landscape painters like Glover "consistently show the Aborigines in places from which they had been expelled and pursuing a way of life which they no longer enjoyed" (Images in Opposition, p.24).
Of rather greater significance than the shape of the eucalyptus trees...but Bonyhady points out that until 1945 the dominant issue was how successfully the artists conveyed the shape of the eucalyptus trees and the Australian light. The subject has not gone away. The eucalyptus tree is not just a decorative or subsidiary element of landscape composition, πάρεργον (any more than the olive or cypress trees are minor details of Edward Lear's Ionian Island landscapes), in the sense used by Thomas Blount in 1656:
"Landskip, Parergon, Paisage or By-work, which is an expressing of the Land, by Hills, Woods, Castles, Valleys, Rivers, Cities, &c as far as may be shewed in our Horizon. All that which in a picture is not of the body or argument thereof is Landskip, Parergon, or bywork".
As Sarah Thomas remarked at the symposium, locality and landscape are back with a vengeance.
I'm now reminded of some lines from John Betjeman's belated poetic Christmas Thank-You letter to two members of the British Council staff in Sydney, February 1963, following his first visit to Australia in 1962:
"I should have sent you Christmas Cards. I know
How in the Commonwealth these small things count,
These little thoughts that forge the loving chain
Which binds the gum tree to the English oak".
It's time we all went back to John Ruskin's Modern Painters:
Try Volume I, Part 2, Section VI:
OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION.—CONCLUSION.
CHAPTER I.
OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION.***
JOHN GLOVER
A Corroboree of Natives in Mills Plains, 1832
Oil on canvas, 56.5 71.4 cm
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Morgan Thomas Bequest Fund, 1951
JOHN GLOVER
View of Mills Plains, Van Diemen's Land, 1833
Oil on canvas, 76.2 114.6 cm
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Morgan Thomas Bequest
Fund, 1951
JOHN GLOVER
A View of the Artist's House and Garden, in Mills Plains, Van
Diemen's Land, 1835
Oil on canvas, 76.4 114.4 cm
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Morgan Thomas Bequest Fund, 1951
JOHN GLOVER
`Cawood' on the Ouse River, 1838
Oil on canvas, 75.5 114 cm
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart. Presented by Mrs
George C. Nicholas in memory of her husband, 1935 - See more at: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/visual-arts/artworks-in-londons-royal-academy-show-australia/story-fn9d3avm-1226722071425#sthash.L8Jx65IG.dpuf
Update on Bush Fires
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