National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Turner to Monet: the triumph of landscape

Although a genius, Courbet was certainly a magnet for trouble. No other artist in nineteenth-century France so often found himself surrounded by controversy, apart from Edouard Manet – although Manet extricated himself, while Courbet seemed constantly enmeshed in scandal and uproar. But he was also firmly connected to the best artists working in the middle decades of the century, from Corot to Whistler, and Cézanne to Monet – he was even the witness at Monet’s wedding in 1870. Courbet remains the most radical painter of his time, while his work marks the rupture from Romanticism via Realism that produced modern art. A deep attachment to his native region inspired Courbet throughout his life, and is demonstrated in his art. He knew the farms near Ornans, the town and its people, and gloried in the rugged beauty of the Jura mountains in his eastern province of Franche-Comté. The rivers of the Jura, the Loue and the Lison, their limestone cliffs, grottoes, waterfalls and vegetation, provided a never-ending subject for the artist. In Paris, Courbet played the coarse peasant new to the city, but there was a serious purpose in his stout defence of regions against the centre. Throughout the century the French state tried to centralise all power to the capital and government institutions, artistically as well as politically, and Courbet was a rebel by conviction. Most of his landscapes of the 1860s – made after the scandals of the Salon and before the catastrophic defeat of the Paris Commune, his imprisonment, and self-exile – concentrate on a limited, almost claustrophobic vocabulary of motifs. As well as enclosed forest scenes with deer and views of hunting, there are Courbet’s Source paintings. Stone, water and darkness are enlivened by rushing currents, decorated with green moss, spring growth or autumn foliage. Apart from over-determined, psychoanalytic readings (grotto = wish for a return to the womb), the Jura works display broad and vigorous handling as well as local particularity based on plein-air observation. In Source of the Lison, as in his other Jura landscapes, Courbet cuts off the sky or any conventional vista, and medium or long views. We are forced close to the rocky cliffs and mysterious cave, confronted with cold, green–brown water pouring from its geological origin, the rising of the river. Paint is mainly brown, with white, bright green and orange highlights. It is applied thickly, pushed around with palette knife and spatula, to accentuate the materiality of the subject. The canvas is vertical, and Courbet accentuates the height of the cliffs by forcing movement down the cliff-face and over the splashing waterfall. Cézanne’s cubes, spheres and pyramids owe some of their genesis to Courbet’s admiring yet brusque painterly treatment of his native landscape. Christine Dixon

Corot was modest and chaste. He never married, in company was nearly always overlooked, the Salon ‘treated him rudely,’ and the only painting by him to enter the Luxembourg Museum was ‘bought almost accidentally by the state in 1851’.1Yet the great Charles Baudelaire was one of many who admired the qualities of simplicity and sureness in Corot’s art and personality – traits that were at the opposite extreme to Baudelaire’s flamboyance. Corot, he wrote, exerted complete control over his compositions, guaranteeing that every element would be well seen, well observed, well understood and well imagined.2 In Bridge on the Saône River at Mâcon the paint has been laid on directly and unaffectedly. This gives the small work a deceptive look of Impressionism. With their festive and casual appearance, Impressionist paintings were to make a holiday of looking. But Corot’s washerwomen on the river bank are not Monet’s or Manet’s holidaymakers lolling about and enjoying the sun. Likewise, Corot in front of nature seems a disciplinarian rather than a sensualist. The date 1834 is not at all early for an outdoor sketch – which this possibly is – yet it does seem early for such a masterly exercise in facing down nature for the sake of form. Nature has here been translated by rule and measure, scale and calculation. One takes pleasure in the composition of four symmetrical rectangles and repeated arcs, the enveloping, sand-coloured light and well-managed paint textures. Selective accents of shape, tone and texture stand out by virtue of their difference. Paint strokes that seem spontaneous are, in fact, controlled. The ground from mid-way has been fastened down in solid, creamy earth colours. Above and to the sides, the semi-transparent blues and greens of sky, foliage and water vaporise against the underlying earth colours. Rough against smooth, a small area of mottled dabs describes shallow water near the bank and, on the other side of the picture, striations of green paint across the grain of the support ruffle the foliage as if simulating a breeze. Visual sensation had a place when it suited Corot’s purpose. In memorable early paintings he downplayed the figurative subject through using lively visual effects. The light in a canvas featuring a woman prone on the grass goes past her to a glowing clay bank in the middle distance.3 The gleaming but otherwise meaningless lump of wet clay takes centre stage, successfully eclipsing the woman. In another work a man on horseback rides away from us; the eye is captured less by the figure, painted grey against grey, than by the sunlight jolting on the uneven bridle path this side of the figure.4 A remarkable landscape sketch is captured by a shapeless black shadow that leaps across the sunburnt fields.5 The irresolution between sketchiness and precise form in Bridge on the Saône River at Mâcon has the same liberating effect, what Corot’s detractors called lack of finish and Baudelaire his ‘awkwardness’. Where lesser artists finished off a work of art, the end for Corot was to open it. Mary Eagle 1 Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism: the mythology of nineteenth century art, London: Faber, 1984, p. 230. 2 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Salon of 1845’, trans. Jonathan Mayne, Art in Paris 1845–1862: salons and other exhibitions reviewed by Charles Baudelaire, London: Phaidon, 1965, p. 24. 3 The Forest of Fontainebleau, 1834, National Gallery of Art, Washington – The Chester Dale Collection. 4 A View Near Volterra 1838, National Gallery of Art, Washington – The Chester Dale Collection. 5 Le Petit Chaville, near Ville-d’Avra c. 1823, The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology – Bequeathed by Frank Hindley Smith, 1939.

By the early 1830s Turner was a regular visitor to the seaside town of Margate, on the eastern tip of the county of Kent, about seventy miles downriver from London. Turner’s first introduction to Margate came in the 1790s, when the place was essentially just a small fishing town, but it had since become a bustling resort that Londoners could reach effortlessly by steamboat in half a day. The geographic setting is remarkable, benefiting from a magnificently open prospect over the sea to the north and east, which allegedly induced Turner to claim that the skies in this area were among the loveliest in Europe. In addition to this natural prospect, the attractions of Margate were somewhat unorthodox for Turner, stemming from his clandestine relationship with Sophia Caroline Booth (1798–1875), a young widow, who was initially his landlady and subsequently his mistress and muse. From the windows of Mrs Booth’s lodging-house, near the harbour quay, Turner was able to watch the arrival and departure of the London steamers, a couple of which formed the subject of a painting he displayed at the Royal Academy in 1840 Rockets and blue lights (close at hand) to warn steamboats of shoal water.1 The basic composition of that work was anticipated by a study, Waves breaking on a lee shore c. 1840, which is a pair to the work exhibited here.2The studies focus on the shore on either side of Margate harbour; in this case looking back from the west to the light tower at the end of the protective outer wall, which is created as a dull silhouette by the later application of a lighter area of whitish grey paint around it. As in even his earliest depictions of the sea, Turner sought to give his painted representation dramatic textures that replicate, and seemingly act as a substitute for, the movement of water. Both of the Margate studies are painted with such expressive vigour that it has generally been assumed they may have been direct observations of the rolling sea, capturing the surge of the waves as they splay upwards into flying crests, before crashing on the beach. Though Turner evidently did make plein air studies in pencil and watercolour at Margate, the impracticalities of working in oils, while witnessing such fast-changing weather conditions, make it unlikely that this picture would have been painted in the same way. This makes the apparent spontaneity and directness of his images all the more impressive, especially his vivid attempts to provide an impression of the sea in motion, at a time before the introduction of photography enabled artists greater opportunity to dissect the underlying principles of movement more precisely.3] Ian Warrell 1 Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The paintings of J.M.W. Turner, rev. edn, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984, cat. 387; collection of Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown. 2 Butlin and Joll, cat. 458, collection of the Tate; Ian Warrell (ed.), J.M.W. Turner, Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2007, cat. 133, where re-dated from c. 1835 to c. 1840. 3 For a more qualified appraisal of Turner’s depictions of the sea, see Christiana Payne, Where the sea meets the land. Artists on the coast in nineteenth-century Britain, Bristol: Sansom & Co., 2007, p. 49, notes 31, 60.

A large, ambitious scene of arctic exploration, imagined fifty years after the event and half a world away, seems an unlikely Australian project. Jenner, a self-taught English immigrant painter, tried to establish a cultivated artistic climate in Queensland at the end of the nineteenth century. Such grand history paintings, employing all the stratagems of the Sublime, would make the artist’s reputation unassailable, he thought, as well as serving another purpose, that of elevating public taste. His subject was Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition of 1845, to find the fabled Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The venture fascinated the public, writers, and the press for decades; the British government, prodded by Lady Franklin, sent thirty-two expeditions to find the vanished explorers, Swinburne wrote a long poem in 1860, and Jules Verne published two novels inspired by the topic in the 1870s. Reports of cannibalism among survivors kept the story alive and scandalous. Jenner remembered arctic scenery and details from a journey taken in his youth. He sailed in the early 1850s, he said, on ‘a voyage to Lapland, Nova Zembla and Spitzbergen’.1At the age of eighteen in 1855, Jenner joined the Royal Navy for a decade, then retired to his birthplace, Brighton, to become an artist. Unhappy with his prospects as a marine and genre painter there, he emigrated with his large family to Brisbane in 1863. En route he witnessed the effects of Krakatoa’s eruption, another instance of Nature’s grand and sublime spectacles. For his modern history painting Cape Chudleigh, Coast of Labrador, Jenner painted icebergs in Labrador, populated by hundreds of great auks – large, penguin-like birds, hunted to extinction in the 1840s. The whole is lit by a full moon under a cloudy sky. Apart from icy white and blue for freezing water, sea and sky, atmosphere and rocks are rendered in smoky brown and grey, with red reflected from the ship on fire behind an iceberg.2 The ghostly theatre of Franklin’s fatal voyage is accentuated by Jenner’s spectral depiction of translucent ice, a disappearing mountain and bizarre spectating birds, scattered like the ill-fated crew through the sea and absent land. Jenner’s invisible hero, Franklin, was linked closely to colonial Australia’s brief history: he accompanied Matthew Flinders on the Investigator’s initial circumnavigation of the continent in 1801–04, and served as Governor of Tasmania from 1836 to 1843. Nonetheless, the artist’s extravagant vision of the voyage was profoundly unfashionable. The extremes of the Sublime, especially delight in terror and heightened emotions, had dissipated their effect by the end of the century, while unsuccessful English explorers no longer caught the imagination of poets and engravers. European aesthetic manners and themes were replaced in Australia by the local and immediate paintings of the Heidelberg school.3 Jenner was triply unfortunate, in that his subject and style were no longer appreciated, and any audience was sparse. Nonetheless, he ensured some posterity by reworking and donating this large canvas to the infant Queensland National Art Gallery upon its opening in 1895. Christine Dixon 1 Margaret Maynard, ‘Jenner, Isaac Walter (1837–1902)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, online edition, viewed November 2007, adb.online.anu.edu.au. 2 Gavin Fry, Bronwyn Mahoney, Bettina MacAulay, Isaac Walter Jenner, Sydney: Beagle Press, 1994, p. 34. 3 See Glen R. Cooke, Catalogue worksheet for Acc. number 1:0014, Queensland Art Galle

painting, oil on canvas, 43.0 (h) x 53.0 (w) cm, Museum purchase, Grover A. Magnin Bequest Fund.

Here we see a field of lucerne, the green crop infiltrated by red poppies. Along the skyline is strung a series of pale sheds and outbuildings under a silvery sky. In the distance is Saint-Denis, a suburb ten kilometres north of central Paris, which was industrialising rapidly in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The painting has a very high horizon line: Seurat depicts the plants as eighty per cent of the canvas. On the right against the sky is a small tree, and in the foreground a darker mass results from the shadow cast by a large tree behind the artist and the viewer. The luscious intensity of Seurat’s paintings is achieved by pure colour and his application of paint in small, organised strokes. The colour wheel was first elaborated by the chemist Chevreul in 1839, with red, blue and yellow being primary, and the mixtures violet, green and orange secondary colours. Each resulting hue can be lightened or darkened by white or black. Colour theory is based on the spectator’s changing perceptions, each colour being affected by surrounding ones. Instead of pre-mixing paints, Divisionist or Neo-Impressionist artists like Seurat placed patches of pure colour alongside each other, so that the eye would blend them. In Lucerne, Saint-Denis the bright green of the lucerne is produced by Seurat’s short, straight strokes of blue and yellow, criss-crossed to produce the animated field. Joyous interruptions of red, white and pink occur when flowers emerge from the crop. The shade from the tree in the right front is produced by darker blue, with less yellow. Beyond the fence, paintstrokes become horizontal, calming the view and lightening in tone towards the distant horizon and sky. Seurat employs these radical strategies to produce an all-over effect, so characteristic of art after the first Impressionist experiments in the 1860s and 1870s. There is no story to tell here, no incident to draw conclusions from, only the reproduction of visual effects as perceived by the artist. The nature of beauty has changed, as the painter makes new and different choices of subject and technique, so that the content and meaning of art are transformed. Christine Dixon

L’Estaque, a fishing village on the French coast of the Mediterranean, was a place that Cézanne visited often in the 1870s and 1880s. Why, amongst more picturesque features such as blue sea and a pretty village of ochre stone and red tiles, did the artist address such a difficult and unappealing prospect as this? A viaduct is only an overland passage between more dramatic features – under mountains or cliffs, through a valley or over a river far below – and this bridge for the railway track has none of the elegantly classical appeal of Corot’s Roman arches. Indeed, the viaduct is barely noticeable: it sits in the lowest band of the painting, the main horizontal of the composition. Perhaps it was, as always, simply because he could. The nature of beauty itself was changing as the century continued, from gentle to hard, from simple, lush and historic to complex, spare and modern. For Cézanne, eternal verities became mutable, and reality was filled with infinite possibilities. During February and March 1882 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, a much more luscious painter than the austere Cézanne, paid a visit to his contemporary at l’Estaque while en route from Italy to Paris. They painted the same scene, but the two resulting landscapes could not differ more, considering they were executed side by side.1 Johnson describes Cézanne’s strategies on the canvas: The flatness of the effect, accentuated by repetition of the receding and advancing color and tone values may, on first impression, bear some resemblance to tapestry design; but this quality is denied by the special depth and volume and solidity of the forms which Cézanne achieves … He has piled the planes up vertically and has silhouetted distant hills instead of allowing them to dissolve in air and space.2 The contest between fact and fiction, which underlies landscape painting in the nineteenth century, is seen plainly here, in the choices that Cézanne makes. He understands that the horizontal railway lines below the cliffs undermine the vertical and diagonal slopes of the mountains. The dizzying stacks of rock, made of parallel hatched strokes of paint, communicate insecurity rather than the permanence of stone and mountains. The close-up, frontal encounter reinforces the dominance of the artist’s view. It is the implied struggle between doubt and certainty that makes Cézanne so modern. Christine Dixon 1 John Rewald, The paintings of Paul Cézanne: a catalogue raisonné, vol. 1, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996, cat. 441, p. 297; the other canvas is Renoir’s Crags at l’Estaque, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 2 Ellen H. Johnson, ‘Cézanne and a pine tree: Viaduct at l’Estaque, a footnote’, Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin, vol. 21, no. 1, Fall, 1963, pp. 24–8, quoted in Rewald, p. 297.

This is a devotional image, paying homage to science, Nature and God. Huge in its pictorial implications, the painting is nonetheless modest in size. South American landscape is one of the ‘prototype’ South American subjects the thirty-year-old Church composed before embarking on his magisterial Heart of the Andes 1859, which lifted him to first place among American artists. In South American landscape Church responds to the renowned geographer Alexander Humboldt who identified the Andes as best portraying the separate ecologies that together made the global geography. Humboldt’s theory stemmed from an expedition to South America from 1799–1804, when he and his companions travelled from tropical jungle at sea level to mountains with permanent snow. Charles Darwin, travelling to South America thirty years later – with Humboldt’s writings in hand – found evidence that a parallel to Humboldt’s adaptive ecologies existed in biology. Church, visiting Colombia and Ecuador in 1853, deliberately set out to capture in art Humboldt’s geography of the cosmos. Looking at the painting, it soon becomes apparent that this is not a landscape taken from one place. Rather, it is an assemblage of unlikely points of view which combine to overwhelming effect. Judged by photographic realism, the scene is frankly impossible; yet it is precisely because the painting lacks a governing perspective that the artist is able to suggest a scale that is measureless. Church’s concept is therefore unlike the panoramic landscapes by von Guérard, Bierstadt and Daubigny, which show the scope of a scene from a single vantage point. Church painted for an audience whose aesthetic embraced the idea that the path to inspiration was through education. Within this approach, South American landscape expresses two types of ‘truth’. One is the truth of inspired imagination; another is the minutiae of description. Knowledgeable viewers in the mid-nineteenth century used opera glasses to study the details incorporated into the picture from Church’s many field drawings. Failing a handy magnifying glass, we still view the image as a composite of separate parts, each with its own scale and perspective. Multiple possibilities offer themselves. Following the path of light from a bridge and waterfall gleaming in the chasm on the left, the eye is led vertically to a church poised on the peak of a mountain. The dark, sheer rugged country between those signs of human habitation conveys a subliminal message that the eye may travel where a human body cannot. Another kind of separation is implied on the other side, where a figure strolls towards us along a sun-striped path. A giant in comparison to the trees flanking the path, the figure is likewise strangely dissociated from the scene by a nonchalant disregard for what it portends. Behind is a tumescent mountain capped with snow, hazed and ruddy-coloured below, where it rises from a labyrinth of impassable mountains and bottomless clefts. This scene cannot conform to practicable travel, even tourism to the exotic: it is visionary. The urgency of Church’s vision of natural ecology is relevant again in our time. The canvas suggests vast natural rhythms of an ongoing natural evolution on a scale that stretches human faith and imagination. Disjunctive landscape forms and abrupt conjunctions of tones and colours enforce incredible combinations, whereby a tropical palm is cheek-by-cheek with eternal snow. The idea of order seems interchangeable with cosmic disorder. Mary Eagle

… this amazing mountain continues to exhibit such various scenes of sublimity and beauty at exactly the distance one would chuse to observe it from; a distance which almost admits examination, and certainly excludes immediate fear … columns of flame, high as the mountain’s self, shoot from its crater into the clear atmosphere with a loud and violent noise … a thick cloud, charged heavily with electric matter, passing over, met the fiery explosion … Hester Thrale, 17891 Mount Vesuvius was especially active in the late eighteenth and for most of the nineteenth century.2This fact, along with a growing awareness of the natural sciences in this period, meant the volcano attracted a great deal of interest. Indeed images of Vesuvius in various states of activity, as well as other scenes of uncontrollable nature – avalanches, storms, fires – became synonymous with the Sublime and with Romantic art. In the 1770s the English artist Joseph Wright of Derby, Frenchman Pierre-Jacques Volaire and German Jacob Philipp Hackert all produced views of Vesuvius, establishing the conventions for subsequent images. They presented the erupting volcano as a spectacle by moonlight, rivers of lava observed by tiny frock-coated gentlemen, juxtaposed against the built environment or surrounded by calm harbours. The paintings produced by later Romantic artists tended, on the other hand, to portray the volcano with as much precision and more emotion. In 1818, Dahl, Bergen-born and Copenhagen-trained, set out for an extensive study tour of the continent – although he didn’t make it very far. Travelling via Poland and then Berlin, he settled in Dresden where, apart from his 1820–21 sojourns to Italy and frequent trips back to Norway, he remained for the rest of his life. Dahl witnessed some of the 1820 eruptions while in Naples; he sketched Vesuvius on the spot, subsequently producing many paintings based on these experiences. Dahl shares this fantastic composition with his friend and compatriot, the Viennese painter Josef Rebell.3In both paintings, the profusion of colour, audacity of the scene and its sheer extremes – the gleam of the bright moonlit sky, the glow of molten lava tumbling into the sea, the treacherous waves set against perilous rocks – convey ‘not a sense of fear but a sort of ecstasy’.4 Much of the fascination of Eruption of Vesuvius is a result of the combination of the opposing elements of fire and water. Usually a stormy sea such as this would be enough in itself to engender a sense of awe. Here it is pitted against a volcano, which shoots flames into the sky, fills the sky with black smoke and scatters fiery girandoles far and wide. The debris even reaches a stone monument adorned with a cross, on the rocky shore opposite – dangerously close to where we are standing! On the right-hand side, soot merges with the silhouetted coast. The moon ventures through the darkened clouds, just enough to cast light on the foreboding scene below. This is Sublime Nature. We feel the power of Vesuvius and anticipate its destructive forces. Lucina Ward 1 Herbert Barrows (ed.), Observations and reflections: made in the course of a journey through France, Italy and Germany by Hester Lynch Piozzi, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1967, pp. 223–4. 2 There were six major eruptions in the 1700s and a further eight next century: in 1822, 1834 and 1839; two each in the 1850s and 1860s; and again in 1872. 3 It is not known if Dahl’s is a copy after Rebell, or whether the two artists worked together in Italy. Rebell’s The eruption of Vesuvius at night 1822 is in the Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna. 4 Johann Kräftner, Liechtenstein Museum Vienna: Neoclassicism and Biedermeier, Munich and New York: Prestel, Vienna: Liechtenstein Museum, 2004, p. 118.

Two men on a hillside, standing on a stony outcrop, look at the crescent moon shining in a luminous sky. Framed between a strong, sinuous oak and an angular, spiky pine, the younger man leans on his companion’s shoulder, as though overcome by beauty. These are not detached scientific observers scrutinising a lunar phenomenon, but witnesses of God’s ever-surprising Nature. Instead of that scientific examination of natural phenomena so characteristic of German learning at the time, Friedrich’s painting is a parable of Christianity and paganism. The oak, used for heathen rituals, is dying; the evergreen pine, a symbol of Christianity, lives. The men are protected underneath its branches. Friedrich painted several versions of this scene, similar in composition although varying in character. The earliest known dates from 1819, another of a man and woman was made c. 1824, and at least two more were painted about 1830.1Friedrich’s friend Dahl refers to later versions by the artist and others in a letter of 26 September 1840, at the time he donated the 1819 painting to the Dresden Gemäldegalerie in memory of Friedrich: This picture, full of sentiment and the quietness of nature, was painted by Friedrich in 1819 and he gave it to me in exchange for one of my own works. Friedrich had to copy it several times, but he did not approve of this, hence others copied it as well.2 While there is some disagreement about this version, close examination reveals Friedrich’s blue underdrawing, a generous execution, and liberal and unique application of colour.3The characteristic freedom of the artist’s hand can be seen here, with the silhouette of a dead branch on the right, jutting from a large rock – a pagan dolmen – which seems to buttress the old oak tree. A sawn stump on the left testifies to human life cut short while new vegetation, representing a growing Christianity, appears in a line of young pines on the right. Friedrich’s earlier works often show a lone hero in the landscape. A pair of figures now become part of the artist’s repertoire, to symbolise friendship. They wear German national dress; the cloak and hat signalled opposition to the French invasions under Napoleon, and they were still popular signs of dissent against later reactionary German governments under Metternich. The men have been identified as Friedrich, leaning on a walking stick, and his pupil, August Heinrich (1794–1822), who died of consumption. It is touching the way the younger leans upon the older man, rather than the conventional reverse. Friedrich captures the temporary and evanescent effects of this expedition to watch the moon and Venus, a strange phenomenon counterpoising the effects of light and darkness. The moon-filled sky is pale and glowing, denying blackness as the moon’s natural element. The material world is dark, outlined against the eerie heavens. Christine Dixon 1 The 1819 painting is in the Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden. A version made c. 1824, depicting the artist and his wife Caroline is in the National Galerie, Berlin. A c. 1830 version is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; this 1830s version is held in the Galerie Hans, Hamburg. 2 Letter to the Dresden Gemäldegalerie, Sächsische Hauptarchiv, cited in Helmut Börsch-Supan and Karl Wilhelm Jähnig, Caspar David Friedrich: Gemälde, Druckgraphik und bildmässige Zeichnungen, Munich: Prestel, 1973, p. 216, note 34. 3 Because of its spontaneity and breadth of handling, and original variations on the other versions, this painting is unlikely to be a copy by another artist. Copyists are notoriously careful in their imitation, and all too accurate in their replication. This version is attributed to Friedrich by Werner Sumowski 1969, 1971, 1975 and by Jens Christian Jensen 1999, refuting Helmut Börsch-Supan and Karl Wilhelm Jähnig 1973, who attribute it to a copyist, perhaps Julius Leypold.

Russian painters invented a new, heroic art of landscape in the second half of the nineteenth century. Shishkin demonstrates some of its elements in A sandy coastline: the painting holds an implied moral narrative with nationalist overtones. A few giant but slender pines inhabit the shoreline, their roots gripping into uncertain soil. Waves lap up the beach, unceasing tides which will eventually undermine the trees. Darkest sky lurks behind them, threatening an impending storm and, perhaps, oncoming night. Other trees still stand upon firmer ground in the grass, although many have been felled, hauled away for timber. Bright, intense light glares onto the sand and off the silhouetted trunks. This is nature’s drama, which twists the largest tree away from the viewer, while it withstands the continuous assault of wind and water. Shishkin was a highly-accomplished painter, who trained in the Classical fine art academies of Moscow and St Petersburg from 1852 to 1860. He then studied in Munich, Prague and Düsseldorf from 1862 to 1865, absorbing naturalistic tenets from the German schools. He was a founding member of the famous artists’ group the Wanderers, who began to depict the vastness of Russia’s lands in the 1870s. These reformist painters rejected the artificiality of contemporary pictorial themes, instead commenting on contemporary social ills while developing the first Russian interest in their own surroundings, looking at the bleak beauty of their plains, steppes and mountains. In 1879 Shishkin travelled in the Crimea from May to September, so that he could ‘make plein-air studies in accordance with his fascination for working outdoors’.1 A sandy coastline was exhibited in the 7th Wanderers’ exhibition in St Petersburg in 1879, the year it was painted. Forests became Shishkin’s major subject. His compositions are based on direct observation instead of that compilation of elements that underpins Classical and Picturesque landscapes. His works are also marked by extraordinary attention to detail, seen here in such elements as a tangle of debris washed up on the sand. He combined such realistic renderings with larger poetic truths. A sandy coastline sets up many qualities for us to ponder: light and dark, sunshine and shadows, strength and fragility, enduring time and a fleeting moment. Christine Dixon 1 Notes on the painting by David Jackson, ms, French & Company.

Rousseau began to paint Under the birches, evening in Berry in central France, at the lowest point of his official artistic career. After initial success at the Paris Salon from 1831 to 1835, all of his works were refused between 1836 and 1841. Discouraged, he then refrained from submitting works to the jury until after the 1848 Revolution, when the selection system was reformed. The artist then received an official commission, subsequent acceptance at the Salon, and honours from the state. In the early 1840s, however, when this painting was executed, Rousseau’s dreams of winning the Prix de Rome were over; nonetheless he continued to paint, in his own way. The atmosphere and charm of Under the birches, evening also characterise the artist’s better-known sojourns in the Forest of Barbizon, a place identified with Rousseau for three decades. In summer he worked outdoors in a little hut made for him, painting studies and sketches that were then finished in his studio in Paris.1 Most striking in the composition of Under the birches, evening is the theatrical presentation of a central clump of trees, birches bright with autumnal foliage and their unique black-and-white bark. The dark foreground is echoed by the steel blue–grey fading light of day, changing as night begins to fall. Light is concentrated upon a central oval, where a slight narrative interest is given by human presence in the form of the humble curé. No means of entry is provided to the viewer, however, no path, rising hill nor descent into a valley. The grove is presented as a visual fait accompli, a feature that struck the artist’s eye full-on. Rousseau’s debt to seventeenth-century Dutch landscape is obvious in his division of the canvas into three horizontal bands, concentrating on the middle ground, and his stubborn portrayal of the unexceptional, anti-Romantic theme. Contemporary English masters – Constable, Bonington, Turner – awoke painters in France to the importance of exact depictions of changing conditions: light, atmosphere, times of day. For Rousseau, the lessons of past Dutch and present English art meant a continuing attachment to his own country and its unique landscapes. There is nowhere more satisfying to be than here, under these trees at this moment, and no finer artist than Rousseau to describe the scene for us. Christine Dixon 1 Théodore Rousseau 1812–1867, Paris: Réunion des musée nationaux, 1967, cat. 22, p. 35.

Luce used landscape compositions such as Camaret, moonlight and fishing boats to explore formal issues of colour and light as well as his own political concerns. The painting depicts fishing boats at night in the protected harbour of Camaret, a small fishing village in Brittany on the Atlantic coast. It is executed in Luce’s characteristic divisionist style, distinguished by the building up of the painted surface using separate brushstrokes of colour. The artist employs varying shades of green and periwinkle blue, along with pink and yellow for the night sky. Violet, blue, turquoise and deep pink splotches, along with green and lemon-yellow strokes serve for the areas of shadowed and moonlit water. Deep blues, purples and near-blacks make up the silhouetted shapes of the fishing boats. By 1887 Luce had adopted the divisionist technique first developed by Seurat, a fellow French Neo-Impressionist artist. The technique was based on theories about colour and seeing, which asserted that the eye would blend colours juxtaposed on the canvas. The adjacency of complementary strokes of colour would produce a brilliant effect, closely approximating the appearance of natural light. This effect was well suited to Luce’s project here, of representing the luminosity of moonlight on calm water. Luce also began showing with other Neo-Impressionists in 1887, contributing to their third independent exhibition in Paris. In addition to a commitment to colour theory, Luce shared with some of these artists a dedication to the tenets of Anarchism. The form of Anarchism he endorsed was an idealistic socialism, involving precepts of social harmony and the absence of a centralised government.1His convictions included an abiding interest in the condition of the working class, whose members and places of employment occasionally appear in his paintings. Luce often portrayed modern industrial work sites as locations of strenuous labour or intrusion into the landscape.2In Camaret, moonlight and fishing boats, however, he depicts the boats as representatives of a more traditional livelihood. They are presented in a moment of quiet restfulness, fully integrated with the other elements in the scene. The repeated forms of hulls and bare masts become a decorative pattern against the variegated colours of the sea. Janeen Turk 1 Joachim Pissarro and Eliot W. Rowlands, Maximilien Luce, 1858–1941: the evolution of a Post-Impressionist, New York: Wildenstein, 1997, pp. 12–14, 20. 2 Anne-Claire Ducreux and Aline Dardel, Maximilien Luce: peindre la condition humaine, Paris: Somogy Editions d’Art 2000, pp. 72–87; Denise Bazetoux, Maximilien Luce: catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, vol. 2, Paris: Editions JBL 1986, cats 799–951, 1046–65.

Turner looks to Claude Lorrain, the great artistic model of seventeenth-century Classical landscape painting, for his composition of Crossing the brook. Devices include framing trees to left and right, while Turner also uses light to lead the eye through a curving central valley until it meets a limpid white sky, which dissipates upwards into palest blue. Dark planes intersect in the foreground across the front of the water, down through the foliage and tunnel path on the right. A spotlight picks out three figures who ford the brook: one girl has waded across, then looks back to her dog in midstream. The animal helps by carrying her basket, while another young woman prepares on the far bank by removing her shoes and tucking up her dress. Further along the valley are an aqueduct and large waterwheel. We are not in the Roman campagna, however, but rather in an equivocal English Arcadia. The brook leads into the River Tamar, which divides Devon from Cornwall, while the arches belong to Calstock Bridge. The wheel drives water for a clay pit: this is modern Britain at the end of the Napoleonic wars. War with France has lasted more than twenty years; Britain is all but bankrupt, and appears to be on the verge of revolution. Turner, always a history painter, manages to meld a Classical manner with a contemporary subject. Rural England now includes industry and urbanisation, implying a new vision of beauty. Between 1811 and 1814 Turner made three journeys into the West Country. These were extended summer tours, primarily to make watercolours for an engraving commission, Picturesque views of the south coast of England, which was published in sixteen parts from 1814 to 1826. In his last trip in 1814 Turner ‘sketched around the River Tamar, making studies of the river valley at Gunnislake and Calstock’.1 The artist exhibited two large oils, Crossing the brook and Dido building Carthage, at the Royal Academy in 1815. Despite the different scale of ambition that seems to mark their titles and subjects, an idyllic English scene could also be a grand history painting, to be shown at the season which marked Britain’s final victory over Napoleon. The large vertical landscape was well received, and praised by most. Not everyone liked it, however: Sir George Beaumont, the artist’s enemy, characterised it as ‘weak and like the work of an Old man, one who had no longer saw or felt colour properly; it was all of peagreen insipidity’.2Contemporary viewers may disagree with his sour verdict. Crossing the brook is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century landscape, which encapsulates local and national views of ideal Classical painting. It presents these views in a grand yet succinct form. In 1815 Turner summed up the hopes of a war-weary Britain in this naturalised Claudean landscape of observed incident and eternal pleasure. Christine Dixon 1 James Hamilton, Turner: a life, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997 p. 168. 2 Kathryn Cave (ed.), The diary of Joseph Farington: volume XIII – January 1814 – December 1815, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984, p. 4638, quoted in David Blayney Brown, The art of J. M. W. Turner, Secaucus: Wellfleet Press, 1990, p. 128.

Van Gogh’s extraordinary and tragic life, his feelings and thoughts revealed in prolific correspondence, often overwrites the material reality of his paintings. He was a pioneer of modern art, using the genres of landscape, portraiture and still life to experiment with form and colour. Here, in an extraordinary close-up rendition of urban nature, Tree trunks in the grass, Van Gogh reinvigorates the landscape format by looking down into it instead of outwards, and thus eliminates both horizon and sky. He wrote about the painting in a letter to his brother Theo in early May 1890, in which he also details a planned journey from the asylum at Saint-Rémy to the care of Dr Gachet at Auvers-sur-Oise: … my work is going well, I have done two canvases of the fresh grass in the park, one of which is extremely simple, here is a hasty sketch of it. The trunk of a pine violet-pink and then the grass with white flowers and dandelions, a little rose tree and other tree trunks in the background right at the top of the canvas.1 By cropping the composition so radically, especially at the top and bottom, Van Gogh shows how well he absorbed the strategies of Japanese woodblock artists. He combines these with the exemplar of photography, focusing on one part of an object to stand in for the whole. Verticals and diagonals struggle for dominance, with the main tree trunks sloping slightly, boldly placed off-centre. Our eye is led back by white accents from the foreshortened ground in a zigzag, and through the central field into the dappled lawn under the far trees. It lingers briefly, returning by means of blue marks, to the central motif. In Tree trunks in the grass, the artist’s palette is reduced to light shades of green, white and yellow, highlighted by blue and a little red, allowing tones to accentuate the texture of the main trunk. Other trunks are blue-black, dark against bright spring vegetation. Van Gogh’s characteristically energetic paintstrokes, delicate in the flowers and thicker in the grass, become rugged in the bark of the trees. This landscape was observed close-to, painted on the spot in the asylum garden at the end of April 1890. Van Gogh is a specific, rather than a general, artist: that is, he uses the immediate to communicate larger themes. Looking at the painting, we feel the joy of being outdoors, where sunlight and flowered grass suffuse our senses. Christine Dixon 1 Letter 631, The complete letters of Vincent Van Gogh, 2nd edn, vol. 3, London: Thames & Hudson, 1959, pp. 265, 267.

Dahl came to Dresden in 1818 from the Copenhagen Academy. He soon joined the circle of the Dresden Romantics, centred around Friedrich and Carus. Friedrich’s immediate influence can be seen clearly in Dahl’s works from this period. His initial cloud studies in Dresden show the same delicate, atmospheric handling of the sky that can be observed in Friedrich’s landscapes. It was not until his visit to Italy in 1820–21, however, that Dahl first found his own expressive style. From that time onwards his paintings demonstrate the characteristic use of colour and painterly freedom that even Friedrich admired and sometimes emulated. From 1823 Dahl lived in Dresden in the same house as Friedrich. From the studio window of his apartment he had an unrestricted view over the River Elbe, a fact that was influential in stimulating his interest in cloud studies. He undertook a large series of studies of the sky at different times of day and under various weather conditions. He painted most of these studies using a smaller format than for the rest of his works, and occasionally inscribed the date on them. His interest in the accurate observation of the sky and clouds was stimulated by the discussion that had arisen amongst his fellow Dresden artists in response to Goethe’s essay ‘Howard’s cloud forms’ of c. 1820. Goethe approached a number of artists with a view to getting them to paint visual representations of Howard’s cloud classifications. While Friedrich declined the request, Carus incorporated the principles of scientific exactitude into his own theory and practice of landscape painting. He shared his enthusiasm for Goethe’s work on Howard with Dahl. Shortly before Dahl’s second journey to Norway in 1828, Carus lent him his own edition of Howard’s ‘Essay on the modification of clouds’. Howard’s work intensified Dahl’s scientific approach to painting and in the following years he painted more cloud studies than he had ever done before. The small format, and use of cardboard for the support, lead us to conclude that Dahl actually painted the 1832 study en plein air. The study shows powerful cumulus clouds hovering over the landscape. Dahl paints their bright sunlit-defined forms using strong, muscular brushstrokes. Unlike Constable, he places more emphasis on the cloud’s contours and their sense of mass. Jenns Howoldt Translated by Mark Henshaw and Christine Dixon.

Roberts’s return to Melbourne in 1885, after four years’ study in Europe, marked the end of his long artistic apprenticeship. By the age of twenty-nine he had developed a sophisticated eye and an exceptional technical facility that enabled him to capture the appearance of things. He was also a proselytiser and, back home, looked up his old friend Frederick McCubbin (1855–1917) and enthused him about the European style of plein-air painting. Together they established a weekend painting camp on Houston’s Farm at Box Hill, some sixteen kilometres from the city. It was a primitive approximation to the artists’ colonies of Europe and America, but quickly became a hub of the new painting in Melbourne. Many of the first great works of the Australian Impressionist movement were painted there, in or near the patch of remnant bushland on Gardiners Creek where the camp was located. Paintings such as McCubbin’s Lost1and Roberts’s own A summer morning tiff2 and Wood splitters3captured the intimacy and patchy sunlight of the site. Roberts’s ’Evening, when the quiet east flushes faintly at the sun’s last look’ was painted on the hillside above the camp and is more panoramic in format than the other early Box Hill views. It is also a nocturne – a type of twilight or evening subject that was still something of a novelty in late 1880s Melbourne. Streeton, who joined the group in 1887, recalled: We tried painting the sunset with somewhat conventional and melodramatic results. Roberts pointed to the evening sky in the east, and showed us the beauty of its subtle greys, and the delicate flush of the afterglow, when the shadow of the earth upon its atmosphere, resembling a curved band of cool grey, rises up, and succeeds the rosy warmth as the sun descends further below the western horizon. He was the first artist in Australia to notice it, and to point it out to the native-born.4 Roberts’s painting skills enabled him to capture rapidly the topography of the valley of Gardiners Creek and the view to the Dandenongs. The facture is suggestive rather than descriptive, with a definite drift towards abstraction, particularly in the adjustments made in the studio to the foreground and other areas. Atmosphere was also important, and Roberts succeeded brilliantly in capturing le moment crepusculaire, the stillness of dusk. The only movement is a bird wheeling in from the left, and a waft of smoke rising from a field. ’Evening, when the quiet east flushes faintly at the sun’s last look’ is a national picture, in that its subtext is the claiming and clearing of the land, one of the great themes of nineteenth-century Australian life. As such, it demands a place on Roberts’s list of national pictures, alongside such works as Coming South, Allegro con brio: Bourke Street West, The sunny South and Shearing the rams.5It is also his most poetic and elegiac landscape, Symbolist in its evocation of the slumbering land. Terence Lane 1 Collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. 2 Collection of the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Victoria. 3 Collection of the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery. 4 Argus (Melbourne), 21 June 1932, p. 8. 5 All collection of National Gallery of Victoria, except Allegro con brio: Bourke Street West.

It is astonishing to think that Streeton was only twenty-four years old when he painted ‘Fire’s on’, a work that remains one of the great icons of Australian landscape painting. When Streeton wrote to his friend Frederick McCubbin (1855–1917) about the work he was undertaking in the Blue Mountains, his excitement and ambition were palpable. It was the quintessentially Australian landscape and light that inspired him: ‘the vast hill of bright sandstone’ crowned by bush and the ‘deep blue azure heaven’.1Streeton was also taken with the fact that this landscape was the location of one of the engineering feats of the late nineteenth century, the construction of the ‘Zig Zag’ railway line across the Great Dividing Range and a new tunnel that would make this part of the country more accessible. Towards the end of 1891 Streeton spent three months at Glenbrook in the Blue Mountains undertaking numerous sketches and watercolours. By the time he came to paint ‘Fire’s on’, he had familiarised himself with the terrain and was following the development of the railway tunnel with interest. In Streeton’s letter to Roberts in December 1891 he conveyed a tension between his enthusiastic response to the landscape and the dangers involved in the work being undertaken. I arrive at my cutting, ‘the fatal cutting’, and inwardly rejoice at the prosperous warmth all glowing before me as I descend and re-ascend the opposite side up to my shady, shelving, sandstone rock, perched high up … 12 o’clock … and now I hear ‘Fire, fire’s on’, from the gang close by … BOOM! and then rumbling of rock, the navvy under the rock with me, and watching says, ‘Man killed’.2 On the one hand the scale of the landscape and the historic activity of constructing the railway may be seen as an expression of a heroic, nationalistic viewpoint. Yet ‘Fire’s on’ is a complex work, far removed from picturesque or pristine views of the land or people triumphing against the odds. Instead Streeton conveys a clear-eyed view of the pell-mell local scrub and the precarious rocks, dead tree-trunks and random scatter of stones on the steep hillside. On the right, it is as though a layer of earth has been peeled back by human progress to reveal the dazzling white sandstone, ochre soil and gaping mouth of the tunnel. Above the tunnel, delicately drawn figures are dwarfed by the environment, dissolving into its heat haze, while the figures below reveal the perilous nature of their endeavour. Compared with depictions of similar subjects on the theme of human labour in the landscape, it is notable that in ‘Fire’s on’ people are not the main focus. Instead the human drama is enmeshed with the towering, implacable presence of the land. Ultimately it is Streeton’s passionate feeling for the environment as a whole and the heat and light of an Australian summer, conveyed through expressive brushwork, a daring compositional structure and intense, luminous colour, that would be an inspiration for generations of Australian painters to follow. Deborah Hart 1 Letter published in R.H. Croll, Smike to Bulldog: letters from Sir Arthur Streeton to Tom Roberts, Sydney: Ure Smith, 1946, pp. 20–3. 2 Letter published in R.H. Croll, Tom Roberts: father of Australian landscape painting, Melbourne: Robertson & Mullens, 1935, pp. 187–9.

Von Guérard sailed into Milford Sound on the SS Otago on the evening of Monday 24 January 1876. The passengers on the eagerly anticipated four-and-a-half day voyage from Melbourne were not disappointed. Myriad waterfalls dashed down the steep sides of the granite peaks, following recent rain, and the clouds lifted to reveal Mitre Peak and Mt Pembroke – their towering forms reflected in the mirror-like surface of the fiord. The Otago dropped anchor by Bowen Falls at 7 pm. Von Guérard ‘at once had himself conveyed to an island’ where he executed sketches, and three drawings documented with notes on colour and vegetation, before the midsummer sun finally set.1From his chosen viewpoint he developed a panoramic composition of a series of pyramidal forms that stretch across the canvas, rising above the line of the water and reflected in it. Through the power and austerity of the composition, von Guérard communicates the monumental scale and geological age of the dark, angular rocky peaks, the depths of the fiord and the haunting silence of the Sound. His own personal experience is registered in the vignette of tiny figures seen disembarking from their rowboat. Their exhilaration at finding themselves in a place described by a journalist on the Otago as ‘unsurpassed, if equalled, by any cynosure of beauty on the earth’s surface’, is palpable.2 The intensity of von Guérard’s response to Milford Sound was informed by his scientific interest in its geology and vegetation.3 Contemporary reviewers, such as the writer for the Argus, who referred to ‘the steamer, floating like a child’s toy at the foot of one of the “awful cliffs”’, responded to Milford Sound in terms of the British Sublime.4 The Sublime played a part in von Guérard’s vision, but a more revealing context for understanding his portrayal of the subject is the scientific and specifically geological direction taken by German landscape painting in the early nineteenth century. Carus, in his Nine letters on landscape painting, argued for a new type of landscape art, one that revealed the history of the Earth’s formation through a scientifically accurate portrayal of its geology. In Milford Sound von Guérard observed and portrayed the hard, erosion-resistant character of the granite, gneiss and diorite rock formations and the vertical ridges of their foliated geological structure. The glacier at the top of Mt Pembroke – a flash of white in a predominantly dark composition – is a reminder of the glacial activity that shaped this landscape over six million years ago. Von Guérard’s New Zealand journey was the last of his many expeditions in the southern hemisphere. The two major works from this trip, Milford Sound and Lake Wakatipu with Mount Earnslaw, Middle Island, New Zealand 1877–79, were immediately acclaimed by contemporary reviewers.5Milford Sound was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle de Paris in 1878, and won a ‘First degree of Merit Special for Landscape Painting’ at the Sydney International Exhibition in 1879. Ruth Pullin 1 ‘The Otago’s Trip to Milford Sound’, Otago Witness, Issue 1262, 5 February 1876, p. 7. 2 Otago Witness, p. 7. 3 Von Guérard’s scientific accuracy is also evident in his portrayal of the plants found at Milford Sound. It is probable that the feathery flowered grasses in the foreground are the species richardii, a member of the Cortaderia genus. It is known by the Maori as toe toe. My thanks to Richard Neville, Conservation Botanist, Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne, for identifying this plant species. 4 Argus (Melbourne), 2 January 1877, p. 4. 5 Collection of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki.

Here in Brittany the peasants have a medieval air about them and do not for a moment look as though they think that Paris exists and it is 1889 Gauguin, letter to Van Gogh, 18891 Haystacks in Brittany is among a small number of works painted by Gauguin in 1890 at Le Pouldu, on the Breton coast. From July 1886 until his departure for Tahiti in March 1891, Gauguin travelled regularly between Paris and towns in Brittany and Provence – the latter the site of his notorious collaboration with Van Gogh – searching for a way to consolidate his style, as well as a place to live cheaply. He stayed at Le Pouldu, some twenty kilometres south-west of Pont-Aven, late in 1889 and during 1890. The works he painted there, images of peasant life, the landscape and harvest scenes, are some of the most radically simplified of his career. Gauguin described how he ‘scrutinised the horizons, seeking that harmony of human life with animal and vegetable life through compositions in which I allowed the great voice of the earth to play an important part’.2 Like many of his generation Gauguin recognised the strength of landscape painting at this time. His early works show the impact of Corot and other Barbizon painters; he painted in an Impressionist mode until the late 1880s and, introduced by Pissarro, was included in several Impressionist exhibitions. By 1885 Gauguin had started painting full-time and, from his first campaign in Brittany, reduced traditional modelling to a strict minimum: in his Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu works it is his combination of colour and form, rather than narrative or sentiment, which appeals to the viewer. Gauguin’s absorption of the peasant traditions of the region, music and especially woodcarving, as well as the influences of ‘primitive art’ and Japanese prints, is apparent.3Having abandoned Pont-Aven – he complained that it was now too spoilt by crowds – Gauguin set off for the remote hamlet of Le Pouldu. The isolated region, with its dramatic rocky peninsula, windswept dunes, sandy beaches and scattered farms, suited Gauguin. At the Buvette de la Plage – an inn owned by a young local woman, Marie Henry – he was joined by Sérusier and the Dutch painter Jacob Mayer de Haan (1852–1895). Haystacks in Brittany has the structure of a traditional landscape. The painting is composed of a series of bands: the distant sky, fields in the mid-ground and crops of the foreground, with a frieze of cows and their female attendant in front. Despite its variant titles, it is not the agricultural land that is of interest here, but the rich patterns that Gauguin develops from various elements. The disjunction between the landscape’s recession and the frieze-like procession of cows and cowherd emphasises the stained-glass qualities of Haystacks in Brittany. The previous year Gauguin had experimented with a technique he learnt from a restorer. The technique, using paste, newspaper and horn irons, produced a matt surface.4His synthétiste paintings and subsequent work in Tahiti appear to have benefited from this new process. Lucina Ward 1 Written in Le Pouldu, c. 20 October 1889, to Vincent Van Gogh, in Douglas Cooper, Paul Gauguin: 45 lettres à Vincent, Théo et Jo Van Gogh. Collection Rijksmuseum Vincent Van Gogh, Amsterdam, ‘s-Gravenhage: Staatsuitgeverij, 1983, no. 36. 2 Belinda Thomson, Gauguin, London: Thames & Hudson, 1987, p. 102. 3 Gauguin also made sculpture, ceramics and prints as well as carving in wood. 4 Thomson, p. 102.

Three bands make up the painting: a blue sky, pink and grey clouds, the green meadow. A tree at left frames the composition, the central haystack provides a point of focus, a few animals add extra interest, and some exquisite reflections persuade us of the artist’s painterly skills. If we were to follow the thin, flat bayou meandering through the marshland, where would it take us? The distant hills have none of the grandeur or drama expected of landscapes at this period. Even the hand of the artist seems peculiarly absent. We are left with a haystack at the centre of the painting which, on closer examination, is a rather strangely shaped mound. Where, exactly, are we? Marshlands – at the mouth of the Parker River in Ipswich, Massachusetts, or Hoboken in New Jersey, or Southport, Connecticut – held a great fascination for Heade; he produced more than a hundred paintings of the subject. These canvases have various descriptive titles: passing or approaching storms, sudden shower, after the rain, sunrise, sun breaking through, after the rain. Our attention is drawn to the natural forces and meteorological phenomena that shape these environments. Clearly, it was the changing atmospheric conditions and variations in light that attracted the artist. Is this what fascinates us still? Heade began painting salt marshes in about 1858 and continued to paint them for more than four decades, in pairs, thematic groups, or as long series. He worked on marshland subjects intermittently, alternating them with Romantic mountain, tropical, southern or northern landscapes.1 At times, for variety, Heade included duck hunters or their hutches, hayricks or covered haystacks in his marsh scenes – he even created still-life paintings of marsh canvases propped up on trestles.2 Despite all these variants, even with staffage, the best of Heade’s paintings are characterised by a mysterious emptiness. Just as a marsh is a transitional zone between land and water, Heade’s Luminist paintings sit slightly apart from those of the Hudson River School. Like many of his contemporaries, Heade travelled widely: in his early twenties he spent two years in Rome, travelled in Brazil from 1863 to 1864 and his life in the United States was peripatetic. Sunlight and shadow, the Newbury Marshes encapsulates both major European aesthetic traditions: idyllic, light-filled scenes or intense, northern specificity. Looking at Heade’s marsh paintings, those who value stillness may be think of Friedrich’s The Great Preserve c. 1832. Conditions of light in both paintings – twilight in Friedrich’s, the combination of sunlight and shadow in Heade’s – liberate colour from naturalism, contributing an intriguing violet tinge to each scene. Both artists use unnatural colour palettes, and only a few motifs. But like composers, they obtain seemingly endless variations from these notes. In Sunlight and shadow, the Newbury Marshes, Heade makes the ordinary exotic. Lurid colours give the painting a hallucinatory quality, the solitary haystack takes on mystical power, and the deceptive simplicity of the scene makes it seem hyper-real. Here the Sublime verges on the transcendental. Lucina Ward 1 Heade and Church were close friends – Church passed his studio, in a 10th St New York, to Heade – and Church also encouraged his interest in South America. 2 See Gremlin in Studio II c. 1871–75, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; for this and others, see Theodore E. Stebbins et al., The life and work of Martin Johnson Heade: a critical analysis and catalogue raisonné, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but its surroundings bring it to life – the air and the light, which vary continually … For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives objects their true value. Monet 18911 As he matured as an artist, Monet returned to the same motif with endless variations: Rouen Cathedral, poplars, haystacks, waterlilies. It was only in this way that he could seek to capture differing effects of light on objects, and changing times of day, as the nominal theme and composition differed only to a small degree. In the ice-floe paintings he made in and after the severe winter of 1892–93, there are even fewer variables, as the dazzlingly colourful effects of sunlight on vegetation or stone surfaces have been eliminated. Monet had addressed the subject of ice breaking up on the Seine – the ‘débacle’ of the title – at least twice before, in 1868 at Bougival, and in 1879–80 at Lavacourt, near Vétheuil. The thirteen Giverny paintings of 1893–94 were composed and begun at the small village of Bennecourt near his house.2 Having swept along its ice floes for several days, the Seine finally froze over in mid-January, 1893. Monet set up on the Bennecourt bank and painted the river looking towards the hills on the left bank.3 The date 1894 written on the canvas, a year after the freezing flood, puts firmly to rest the myth that Monet always painted out of doors: like almost all artists he finished works in the studio, sometimes large parts of them. In Morning haze Monet’s subject is the disappearance of form and colour under nature’s wintry grey and white coverings of snow and fog on a river. Like Turner, Monet attempts to paint the ineffable appearance of light and water, the infinite array of snow, river, vapour and sky. The tonal spectrum he employs is small, varying from very light to middle tones, while his palette is limited to mixed hues of white and the palest shades of grey and purple. But the skin of paint is robust, built up in layers like masonry. The way mist dissolves material reality is evoked by a haze of paint. The bright snow on the bank emphasises the snow on the ice floes, while the river’s surface reflects the mist and sky, as well as the trees on the far bank and on the little islets. By cutting off the foreground, Monet allows the river to flow out of the canvas, encroaching into the viewer’s world. As so often in Monet’s painting, his experience of transience, of recording an instant, implies time passing and the inevitability of change. Christine Dixon 1 Said by the artist to a visitor to his Haystacks exhibition in 1891, see W.G.C. Bijvanck, ‘Une Impression (Claude Monet)’ in his Un Hollandais à Paris en 1891, Paris: Perrin, 1892, p. 177, quoted in John House, Monet: nature into art, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986, pp. 28–9. 2 Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet: biographie et catalogue raisonné, Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des arts, 1974–1991, 5 vols, cat. 1333–1344, see vol. III, pp. 542–6. 3 Wildenstein, vol. III, pp. 542–3.

The scene is idyllic; abundant cabbage-tree palms sway on the beach as sea fowls soar above Pellew’s Group of Islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria. In December 1802 the Investigator, under the command of Captain Matthew Flinders, sailed into the Gulf, continuing its arduous circumnavigation of Australia. Aboard the sloop was the young artist William Westall, who produced a wide range of sketches during his Australian voyage. Upon his return to England the Admiralty commissioned nine oil paintings of New Holland, including View of Sir Edward Pellew’s Group, Gulph of Carpentaria 1802. Art historians such as Bernard Smith have recognised that this is an innovative and remarkable painting.1 It is notable both for its heightened sense of light and the well-defined horizontal lines, delicately intersected by palms. In standard Picturesque paintings the foreground is dark and brooding, receding to a light background, usually with one tall feature, such as a tree or a mountain, placed at the side to frame the composition. By placing the palms in the centre of a sun-drenched vista, Westall negates this customary sense of recession and avoids neatly enclosing the scene; instead it is left open, clear and light. Painted nearly a decade after he was in the Gulf, Westall has made significant alterations to the original pencil sketch.2Most obvious is the addition of the mia-mia, a small shelter under which are housed rangga, sacred objects. In his account of the voyage, Flinders mentions ‘a small monument’ made up of ‘two cylindrical pieces of stone’, as well as nutmeg ‘growing upon a large spreading bush’ and ‘a pretty kind of duck’, all incorporated into Westall’s work.3 For the artist, the ‘monument’ and other additions are useful because they give the painting that variety and interest demanded of Picturesque landscapes. Westall was clearly aware of Picturesque formulas when he made the changes to his original rough sketches. While in Australia scientific accuracy was Westall’s priority, in London the paintings were intended to win him artistic acclaim. According to theorists such as William Gilpin, the Picturesque should stimulate the imagination to reverie or admiration, and must include a variety of elements. Westall believed the real Australia contained none of these fundamentals: he was scathing in his description of the ‘barren’ coastline, writing that his New Holland subjects could neither ‘afford pleasure from exhibiting the face of a beautiful country, nor curiosity from their singularity’.4 It was therefore incumbent upon him to use his artistic skills to compensate for the dull landscape by making improvements and adjustments. View of Sir Edward Pellew’s Group, Gulph of Carpentaria 1802 is an intriguing work. Westall has conformed to the Picturesque, adding the obligatory variety and interest, while also demonstrating how a new aesthetic can evolve in a new land. Elisabeth Findlay 1 Bernard Smith, European vision and the South Pacific, 2nd edn, Sydney: Harper and Row, 1985, p. 196. 2 Collection of the National Library of Australia, Canberra. 3 Matthew Flinders, A voyage to Terra Australis, London: G. & W. Nicol, Vol II, 1814, entry for 25 December 1802. 4 Letter from William Westall to Sir Joseph Banks, 31 January 1804, Banks Papers CY3008/171-6, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

Constable, one of the foremost British landscape painters of the nineteenth century, first achieved success with his large canvases depicting landscape and life in and around the Stour Valley, which he exhibited between 1819 and 1825. Such was the success of the first of these large paintings, The white horse 1819,1 when Constable exhibited it at the Royal Academy in 1819, that he was elected Associate of the Academy later that year.2 Working on a scale usually reserved for history painting, Constable redefined the notion of a ‘finished’ picture by giving his large landscapes something of the spontaneous freedom and expressive handling of a rapidly painted sketch. The leaping horse is the sixth and the last of these large Stour Valley landscapes and one of the most powerful. Constable chose a place called Float Jump, close to where the course of the old river temporarily left the navigable portion of the Stour. It also marked the boundary between the counties of Essex and Suffolk. The jump itself consisted of a wooden barrier a metre high, constructed across the tow path. Built to stop cattle straying, it was low enough to allow barge horses to leap over it. Constable chose the moment when the horse, mounted by a boy, was leaping the barrier, which gave vigour to the scene. He depicted it from a low viewpoint to give the horse and rider a dramatic presence. Constable’s principal concern was not, however, with the specifics of the location but rather capturing the atmosphere of place and the general feelings associated with experiencing nature. He sought to present nature as something mutable, not fixed. ‘It is a lovely subject,’ Constable said of The leaping horse, ‘lively – & soothing – calm and exhilarating, fresh – & blowing’.3 He wanted his landscapes to create a total experience, including a sense of movement and sound as well as what can be directly observed. In this painting he wanted to convey the feel of the wind, the shimmering of light, the sense of being outdoors. And he extended the experience of the landscape by depicting a moorhen startled from her nest by the thundering of the horse’s hoofs. Constable’s handling of paint is expressionist and almost abstract. He used palette knife as well as brush, with which he created a visual impression of flickering lights and shadows. The light rises as if the sun is coming out and the storm clouds are blowing away. It sparkles on the trees on the left and gives the pollarded tree in the centre a silvery look. Constable also carried through his interest in ‘skying’ into all his large landscapes. In saying the sky was the ‘chief organ of sentiment’ in a painting, he emphasised his belief in the expressive importance of the sky, and its ability to dictate the mood of a landscape.4 His skies are a vital part of his compositions and a main conveyor of mood, as in The leaping horse. They transform comfortable, stable scenes into ones of continual change and transition. Anne Gray 1 The Frick Collection, New York. 2 Constable described this work as ‘a placid representation of a serene grey morning, summer’, Graham Reynolds, The later paintings and drawings of John Constable: text, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1984, p. 156. 3 R.B. Beckett, John Constable’s correspondence VI Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, 1968, p. 198. 4 Beckett, p. 77.

De Wint is widely known for his expansive vistas of flat landscape executed with a confident breadth of handling. His peaceful, open, often sunny, always optimistic and productive landscapes and rural scenes seem oblivious to, or perhaps consciously avoid, the social upheavals of his time, brought about by the Industrial Revolution. As the novelist William Thackeray wrote, ‘[One] might have called for a pot of port at seeing one of De Wint’s haymakings … everything basked lazily for him, and one wondered whether he remained torpid in winter’.1 De Wint’s works are nostalgic and romantic scenes of reaction. He produced simple watercolour sketches of Dutch-like flat landscapes, often taken around Lincoln in south-eastern England. They showed grain-harvesting and haymaking, or conventionally imposing views that included such institutional subjects as cathedrals, county houses and castles. De Wint painted the subject of Kenilworth Castle many times. This is a large exhibition watercolour, the biggest and most highly worked of his known versions of Kenilworth Castle. The castle, in the midland county of Warwickshire, has romantic historical associations from early Norman to Elizabethan times, when it became the seat of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Queen Elizabeth I’s favourite, who entertained her lavishly. It was immortalised in Walter Scott’s popular novel Kenilworth, first published in 1821, only a few years before De Wint painted this watercolour. A visitors’ guide to the castle published in the 1820s says, ‘… as we tread the ground so much famed in history as Kenilworth, the mind is naturally affected with a pleasing pensive melancholy’.2 This is the mood evoked by the artist. John Clare, poet of the natural world and a friend of De Wint’s, wrote in his ‘Essay on landscape’: ‘The only artist that produces real English scenery in which British landscapes are seen and felt upon paper with all their poetry and exillerating [sic.] expression of beauty about them is De Wint’. The balanced composition and careful rendering follows the spirit and grand style of Claude Lorrain who painted in Rome nearly two hundred years earlier. The middle-distant medieval ruins, like Claude’s Roman ruins, are silhouetted against a sky radiating with the warm glow of a setting sun. This magical Claudean light is reflected up from foreground water, and it backlights the classically balanced framing foliage. By capturing the golden light De Wint transforms the subject from mere topography into a landscape of poetry, evoking the passage of time. In doing so he is stylistically linked to his great contemporary Turner, as is amply demonstrated in his Romantic castle of similar date, Alnwick Castle c. 1829, and earlier golden Scarborough town and castle: morning: boys catching crabs c. 1810. Ron Radford Adapted from Ron Radford, Island to empire: 300 years of British art 1550–1850, Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2005, pp. 245–6. 1 W.M. Thackeray, Critical papers in art London, 1911, p. 269. 2 F. Smith, An historical and descriptive guide to Leamington Spa with an account of Warwick and Kenilworth London, first published 1820s, reprinted in 1831, n.p.

Palmer’s landscapes are among the major achievements of the British genre in the first half of the nineteenth century. Though he was admired especially for his early intensely visionary landscapes, Palmer’s later work is more conventional, showing greater concern both for naturalism and looking to the acknowledged seventeenth-century masters of landscape painting. In Summer storm near Pulborough, Sussex black clouds have gathered, the wind has risen and driving rain is already falling, though there is a glimpse of distant sunshine. In the foreground a herdsman gestures to prevent his sheep stampeding off the road; his wife follows carrying a child on her back and beside her is an unhappy yet faithful dog. To the left, near a steadfast windmill and a ruined church, women scurry to retrieve their washing. At the edge of the darkness a horse-drawn wagon and a rider stoically proceed towards a farmhouse visible beyond the mill. Within the darkness, sunlight illuminates the travellers, the roadside stream and bridge. The streaming skirts of the woman, the flapping washing, flitting birds, waving trees and mounting clouds emphasise the force of wind and rain. In this way the artist builds and weaves tension and drama into his landscape. Palmer’s low-lying composition with its domineering clouds owes much to seventeenth-century Dutch Realism, which was a growing influence in the development of British landscape in the first half of the nineteenth century. Turner, Glover and Palmer himself, all of them loyal to the Italian landscape tradition, also relied on Dutch models for naturalistic depiction of weather. In its naturalism and weather effects, however, Palmer’s painting also owes much to Constable’s realism. Summer storm near Pulborough, Sussex is not only a study of weather. It is has religious resonances, pilgrims with their flock of sheep, possibly heading into a deluge. Palmer began his training in watercolour painting at the age of thirteen. While still in his teens, he met the landscape and portrait painter Linnell who introduced him to the prints of Albrecht Dürer and Lucas van Leyden and, in 1824, to the ageing visionary William Blake. Palmer was deeply religious and he began to paint small, almost biblical, dreams of a pastoral paradise. He became the leader of a group of young artists known as the ‘The Ancients’ who were devoted to the Blake’s work.1Palmer, even more than his fellow Ancients, deliberately turned his back on nineteenth-century progress. In 1837 Palmer married Linnell’s daughter Hannah and the couple embarked on what was to become a very influential two-year stay in Italy, where the artist fell under the spell of the past Roman landscape painters Gaspard Dughet, Nicolas Poussin, Salvator Rosa and, above all, Claude Lorrain. The influence of those masters, and of Italian scenery, was to remain with him for the rest of his life, filtered through the Romanticism of his great contemporary, Turner.2 Ron Radford 1 For a catalogue of works produced by Palmer and the Ancients, see Raymond Lister, Samuel Palmer and ‘The Ancients’, Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum & Cambridge University Press, 1984. 2 Ron Radford, Island to empire: 300 years of British art 1550–1850, Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2005, pp. 268–71.

When Glover arrived in Hobart in 1831, the thirty-year conflict between the Tasmanian Aborigines and the European settlers was nearing an end. During this time George Augustus Robinson – the appointed Protector of Aborigines – had been relocating the majority of two hundred Indigenous people to Flinders Island. Only two months before he left Hobart for his new property of Patterdale in northern Tasmania, Glover made two group portraits showing twenty-six members of the Big River and Oyster Bay Aboriginal tribes before their transfer to Flinders Island. They became the subject of a number of significant paintings. Painted in 1832, the year of his move to Patterdale, A corrobery of natives in Mills Plains is Glover’s finest and probably earliest Aboriginal subject. Although the artist’s sketchbook contains a corroboree drawing for this landscape, he could not possibly have seen such an event on his property. As there were probably no Aborigines left in the area and certainly not enough to engage in a corroboree, the gathering is painted from his memory as well as his Hobart sketches. Of the artist’s numerous Aboriginal landscapes this is his first and his most moving and haunting, with its revelations of Glover’s sympathy for the departed Tasmanian Aborigines. Here he depicts an imagined re-creation of a corroboree within a romantic setting. 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. Eight dancing and standing men holding spears, five seated women, two children and what appears to be an infant are gathered beneath the towering eucalypt. Dwarfed beneath the gum they appear almost to be ghosts of a former civilisation. Although Glover has taken possession of the land, it is not without some sense of guilt. And certainly, the theme of dispossession haunted Glover for the rest of his life as he re-created at least twenty such landscapes with Aborigines. Glover’s Patterdale paintings are ultimately based on the landscape devices of Claude Lorrain, Gaspard Dughet and, particularly, Jacob van Ruisdael. But in A corrobery of natives in Mills Plains the mysterious and ominous mood of the painting emulates the wildly romantic landscapes of Salvator Rosa and his depictions of wind-blasted trees and banditti (Italian outlaws). Finally the dusky and lurid sky echoes the highly romantic evening landscapes of Glover’s fellow countryman Joseph Wright of Derby. Though this is probably the first oil painting depicting Tasmanian Aborigines, Glover’s artistic forerunners in New South Wales had already painted night corroborees. Given the demise of the eighteenth-century concept of the ‘noble savage’ – which presented native people in light-filled arcadian paradises – it is not surprising that these images placed Indigenous peoples in a more ominous night light. Dances and ceremonies were presented as curious and heathenish while Indigenous people were represented as something to be feared and civilised by Christianity. Even so, the European settler’s envy is also expressed at their apparently happy and non-materialistic life. A corrobery of natives in Mills Plains can be seen as Glover’s valediction to a dying race. Traditions of European landscape art, romantic notions of the noble savage and his own Christian confidence in the face of paganism, enrich his melancholy testimony to the passing of a lively Aboriginal civilisation. Ron Radford Adapted from Ron Radford and Jane Hylton, Australian colonial art: 1800–1900, Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 1995, pp. 68–70.

Like Pissarro, in his series of Boulevard Montmartre paintings (cat. 83), the Australian Roberts drew inspiration from Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines 1873.1Although we cannot be certain whether, or when, Roberts saw Monet’s painting, the affinities between the works are compelling.2Monet’s, Roberts’s and Pissaro’s paintings all demonstrate a remarkable ability to capture the hustle and bustle of city life; they share an elevated viewpoint, reduced palette, and fractured brushstrokes. Moreover the three artists also embody a determination to embrace modernity: Paris after the Haussmann era, on the one hand, and the energy and excitement of ‘marvellous Melbourne’ on the other. Allegro con brio: Bourke Street west is a lively composition, painted with spirit. The Italian part of the title is a musical term, a playing instruction meaning ‘quickly, with brilliance’. It is one of a group of works painted by Roberts on his return to Australia from London in 1885. Back in Melbourne he resumed his friendship with Frederick McCubbin, then with Streeton and Conder: they regularly painted together at Box Hill, en plein air. The Heidelberg School painters, as they were known collectively, were interested in instantaneous effects, in experimenting with a range of short, broken brushstrokes. Because their works so effectively convey Australian conditions of heat and light, they are regarded as the first home-grown movement. Allegro con brio: Bourke Street west is structured around one of the ‘avenues’ crossing Melbourne’s central business district, at the intersection of Elizabeth and Bourke streets, on the Post Office corner. In the 1880s, as now, the west end of Bourke Steeet was a commercial zone. As McQueen points out, more than a third of the canvas is consumed by buildings.3Prominent signs announce businesses such as Booksellers Dunn & Collins, P. Philipson & Co. and John Danks. The smoke and haze in a clear blue sky, the contrast between the cream and tan exterior walls of the buildings with dark verandahs underneath, figures scurrying across the street or clustered in the shade, all make us aware of the uncomfortable heat. As if for emphasis, two carriages in the centre foreground seem to emerge from the dust. A row of cabs – cable trams were shortly to make horse-drawn vehicles redundant in much of the city – serves to highlight the recession of the street. The word ‘ICE’ appears at the centre, on the side of a cart. At right is the tricoleur French flag; it sits almost at the same spot as a blossom-covered tree in the Boulevard des Capucines. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to imagine that Roberts left us some clues to his sources. Allegro con brio: Bourke Street west is a scene portrayed with much economy in parts, from grand, colonial-style buildings painted in blocks, to the squiggle of a tiny dog in a patch of sun at lower right. In his distinctly Australian portrait of a city that was one of the largest in the industrialised world at the time, Roberts was ‘painting with fire’. Lucina Ward 1 One version of Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines was shown in the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, the other at the Dowdeswell Gallery, London, in 1883. The paintings are in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. 2 Although Allegro con brio: Bourke Street west is not dated, it is generally given to the years 1885–86, the revisions to 1890; Mary Eagle points out that Roberts sent four paintings to the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London, but did not seem to have considered this work sufficiently resolved, or its perspective and drawing of an Academic standard, to include it; see Mary Eagle, The oil paintings of Tom Roberts in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1997, p. 28. 3 Humphrey McQueen, Tom Roberts, Sydney: Macmillan, 1996, see also ‘Tom Roberts: Allegro con brio, Bourke Street west’, viewed November 2007 http://home.alphalink.com.au/-log27/Roberts/roberts_allegro.htm

The Australian Sketcher of November 1873 shows von Guérard’s grand Kosciusko painting displayed at the Vienna Exhibition with other contributions from the Australian colonies. It and another of the artist’s paintings, Cape Woolamai 1872, are surrounded by photographs and maps, produce, flora and fauna, as well as a case of mineral samples and other specimens of interest.1There is some irony here. Von Guérard detailed the lichen on rocks in North-east view from the northern top of Mount Kosciusko – most noticeably on the platform on which the cloaked figure stands – but other parts are less convincing. When von Guérard arrived in Australia in 1852 he was already an established artist, having trained in Rome and Düsseldorf. He had probably seen works by Friedrich; Carus’s published writings also circulated widely during the 1830s and 1840s, the periods of von Guérard’s study at the Staatliche Kunstakademie. In his new southern homeland the artist familiarised himself with native flora by sketching in the Melbourne Botanical Gardens, exactly the close observation of nature promoted by Carus. Von Guérard’s works are an intriguing mix of topographical accuracy and German traditions of the Sublime: we find a range of protagonists throughout his oeuvre, figures often tiny, seen at an angle or with their backs to the picture plane. As Bruce puts it, von Guérard thus synthesises active, intelligent observation with a ‘predominance of feeling over reasoning’.2 In 1862 von Guérard joined an expedition to the Australian Alps. Led by the Bavarian scientist Georg von Neumayer, the expedition was commissioned by the Government of Victoria, part of an international project to measure the Earth’s magnetic fields. As well as a geophysicist and an artist, the party comprised Neumayer’s assistant, two guides and his dog Hector – all of whom are immortalised in the painting. Von Guérard made a number of sketches during the course of the expedition. In Melbourne the following year he produced North-east view from the northern top of Mount Kosciusko.3It is a major painting, regarded as one of his finest artistically, and most accurate topographically. In North-east view from the northern top of Mount Kosciusko areas of the foreground and the mound of large boulders at right are particularly perplexing. Indeed as Bonyhady tells, the rocks were introduced by von Guérard to emphasise human insignificance. They serve to provide a link between foreground, the distant mountains and the sky, that records the passage from heavy rain to bright sunshine.4Most importantly, in aesthetic terms, the rocks echo those on the peaks at the centre of the composition, gloriously patterned by the snow that has melted to reveal the grassy slopes underneath. Mount Kosciusko, an anglicised spelling, was named by the explorer Count Paul Strzelecki in 1840 after the Polish-Lithuanian general Tadeusz Kociuszko.5 The peak was subsequently discovered to be slightly lower than its neighbour, Mount Townsend – although in order that Mount Kosciuszko retain the distinction of the highest mountain in Australia, the names were reversed. Lucina Ward 1 The Australian Sketcher engraving is reproduced in Candice Bruce, Eugene von Guérard 1811–1901: a German romantic in the Antipodes Martinborough: Alister Taylor, 1982, p. 41; the present whereabouts of Cape Woolamai1872 is not known. 2 Bruce, p. 8. 3 Studies held Mitchell and Dixson collections, State Library of NSW; the canvas is inscribed ‘Mt Kosciusko/ 19 Nov. 1862/ Eug. von Guerard’, the date of the expedition. 4 Tim Bonyhady, Australian colonial paintings in the Australian National Gallery Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1986, pp. 188–98, 192–3. 5 In 1997 the Geographical Names Board of NSW adopted the spelling ‘Kosciuszko’; Australian pronunciation differs vastly from the Polish.

Long revered as Monet’s most exquisite series, the Haystack paintings are remarkable for the range of light and weather conditions portrayed. In Haystacks, midday the edges of the stacks shimmer in the heat, and sunlight appears to radiate from the structures themselves. Elsewhere, in the snow scenes, the forms seem to absorb light. The practical nature of the stacks – a means of storing the harvest – receives less attention. When the sheaves of wheat or oats were cut, the cereal stacks were thatched with straw and left to stand until spring, and the arrival of the threshing machines that moved between villages. For a country still smarting from the effects of the Franco–Prussian war – and in a period when France seemed to be rapidly overtaken by industrialised Britain, Germany, the United States or even Russia – Monet’s choice of motif, like the series of poplar paintings that followed, was reassuringly French. The haystacks resonate with notions of rural productivity and the relative harmony of country life. Monet spent extended periods travelling and painting picturesque locations in and around France in the late 1870s to the 1890s – from Vétheuil on the Seine to the coasts of Normandy and Brittany, then London, Venice, Norway and the Mediterranean. Between late 1888 and February 1891 he painted at least thirty canvases of haystacks, of which fifteen were shown in May 1891 at Durand-Ruel’s gallery.1This exhibition built on Monet’s growing success: despite comparatively high prices, most of the Haystacks sold, many of them to American collections where they remain. In October 1890 he could afford to buy the house at Giverny that he had rented since 1883. Ten years later, Monet bought an adjoining field and, from the early 1900s, extended his famous garden with its bridges and ponds of waterlilies (fig. 22, p. 43). Pissarro wrote that Monet’s haystacks ‘breathed’ happiness, but at times the series caused the artist much anxiety.2 In October 1890 he complained about the difficulty of his work, especially his frustration at the time it took to capture instantaneous effects of light.3Haystacks, midday is certainly the result of a ‘long and continued effort’ with its layered paint and compositional changes indicating successive reworking in the field and in the studio. Monet gradually incorporated more and more colour – red–orange at the top of the stack, pink that flecks the stubblefield, touches of orange in the sky, shimmering yellow outlining the trees – until the whole surface of the canvas vibrates in the haze of the midday heat. His sensitivity to rapidly changing light, developed during three decades painting en plein air, as well as the initial haystack paintings made in the previous eighteen months, meant that he was able to extend the series under a greater range of conditions. Clearly it was the changing effects of light, an atmospheric enveloppe around the forms, rather than the stacks themselves, that fascinated the artist. There is a small piece of grass imbedded in the lower right edge of the canvas – perhaps it serves as a reminder of the practical function of haystacks. Lucina Ward 1 Daniel Wildenstein, Monet, or, The triumph of Impressionism (catalogue raisonné), 4 vols, Cologne and Paris: Taschen and Wildenstein Institute, 1996, vol. 3, see cat. W1213–1217 for 1888–89 stacks, W1266–1273 for summer–autumn 1890 and W1274–1290 for 1890–91 winter stacks; the May 1891 exhibition comprised twenty-two works, of which fifteen were haystacks. 2 Camille Pissarro, letter to Lucien Pissarro, 5 May 1891, in Janine Bailly-Herzberg (ed.), Correspondance de Camille Pissaro, 5 vols, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1980–91, vol. 3, l. 658, p. 72. 3 Letter to Gustave Geffroy, 7 October 1890, no. 1076, Wildenstein, vol. III, p. 258.

have always loved the immense streets of Paris, shimmering in the sun, the crowds of all colours, those beautiful linear and aerial perspectives, those eccentric fashions, etc. But how to do it? To install oneself in the middle of the street is impossible in Paris. Ludovic Piette, letter to Pissarro 18721 Early in 1897 Pissarro began a series of paintings of the intersection of the boulevards Montmartre, Haussmann and des Italiens with the rues de Richelieu and Drouot. Between 10 February and 17 April he painted fourteen views looking east along the Boulevard Montmartre, and a further two towards the Boulevard des Italiens. From the 1860s Baron Haussmann’s interventions transformed Paris. The narrow, winding streets of the medieval city – easily barricaded in the 1848 revolution – were destroyed. Approximately 150 kilometres of road were constructed, with long avenues, apartments of a standard height, public gardens, the Paris Opéra and other public buildings, new bridges, gas lamps, a new water supply and sewers, reinvented the city. By the late 1880s Pissarro solved the conundrum suggested by his friend Piette: elevation. From a room in the Hôtel de Russie, on the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens and Rue Drouot, Pissarro looked down onto the new spaces of Paris. Although the artist and subsequent commentators are very particular about the locations of the Boulevard Montmartre series, the city’s topography is not his subject. Rather it is the changing conditions of the streets themselves. Pissaro took several cues from Monet; the high viewpoint and bustling street recall his friend’s painting Boulevard des Capucines 1873.2Both artists show the city’s hustle and bustle – a scatter of people à la japonaise, the melange of dress and hats, pillar boxes and carriage wheels – channelled down the grand boulevard. Boulevard Montmartre, morning, cloudy weather is an extraordinarily energetic painting. Pissarro’s ink and wash drawing of 1897 shows the basic components of the fourteen canvasses, but in the paintings the vanishing point is higher.3This gives the scene greater vibrancy, and makes us feel as if we are leaning out into the street. The merging of the boulevards in the distance, fringed on either side by footpaths, street-level shops and regulation-height apartments, all serve to emphasise the high perspective. A forest of chimneys is echoed by spindly trees, which line the boulevard. The patchwork of shop windows at right seems to take on elements of the crowds. An ‘imperial coach’, the heads of passengers visible through the open roof, ferries people down the boulevard. The scene is rendered with a palette of great subtlety: greys, browns and whites accented with red and tiny amounts of green. Pissarro’s fixed viewpoint meant that he recorded the ever-shifting configurations of crowds and traffic. At times the differences between the position of people in the street from one Boulevard painting to another is so slight that we could be looking at photographs of the same scene, taken only moments apart. Lucina Ward 1 In Janine Bailly-Herzberg (ed.), Mon cher Pissarro – Lettres de Ludovic Piette à Camille Pissarro, Paris: Editions du Valhermeil, 1985, p. 73. 2 Monet, either the version in Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, or the painting in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. 3 Carriages on the Boulevard Montmartre 1897, private collection; see Karen Levitov and Richard Shiff, Camille Pissarro: impressions of city and country, New York: Jewish Museum, 2007, p. 70.

Turner had never made any drawings [watercolours] like these before, and never made any like them again … He is not showing his hand in these, but his heart.1 An inveterate traveller, Turner visited Switzerland on his first continental tour in 1802, during the short-lived Treaty of Amiens. He was greatly inspired by the sublime qualities of the alpine landscape, although he did not return until 1836. However during his later years he visited continental Europe regularly, travelling through Switzerland annually from 1841 to 1844. The resulting watercolours are acknowledged as some of his most important works; a final flourish in his extraordinary output. In the late summer of 1841 Turner spent time in Lucerne, exploring its surrounding mountains, valleys and lakes. One of the best-known local features is the Rigi, a mountain comparatively small in height (1798 metres) but with a dominant presence to the east of the town across Lake Lucerne. Unlike the numerous tourists who ascended the Rigi to witness sunset or sunrise from the summit, Turner was captivated by the mountain rather than its view, and was preoccupied with capturing the transitory effects of light and atmospheric conditions in numerous colourful wash sketches. On his return to London Turner presented his dealer, Thomas Griffith, with a new format for marketing his art, providing him with fifteen small sketches from which his patrons could make selections to be worked up into finished watercolours, together with four such completed ‘specimens’ to demonstrate the result. The four included two contrasting views of the Rigi, one now known as The Blue Rigi,2in which the looming mass is shadowed by the radiant dawn light emanating from behind it, and this work, The Red Rigi, in which the mountain’s heights glow ethereally pink with the last rays of the setting sun. In both, Turner explored the reflections and refractions in the foreground water and the activity on the lake’s surface, probably viewed from his hotel window. The Red Rigi was purchased by his Scottish friend and patron H.A.J. Munro of Novar, who acquired half the resulting ten watercolours, commissioning another dawn view, known as The Dark Rigi.3Turner’s great advocate John Ruskin first saw The Red Rigi displayed at Griffith’s salesroom and recalled ‘such a piece of colour as had never come my way before’: within a few years his father had acquired it from Munro.4In 1851 Ruskin senior wrote to his son in Venice informing him of Turner’s death, saying that The Red Rigi ‘fed and soothed me like a Dead March all this evening …’.5 In 2007 the three finished Rigi watercolours were united for the first time, exhibited at Tate Britain, along with their sample sketches, additional studies and paintings based around Lucerne. Varying noticeably from their original sketches, the watercolours demonstrate the remarkable level of sophistication to which Turner had raised the medium. Skilfully combining stippling, hatching, scratching back to create highlights, washes and gouache, and with incomparable colouristic ability, Turner evokes a luminous grandeur to the Swiss vista that he studied with such contemplation. Alisa Bunbury 1 John Ruskin in E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (eds), The works of John Ruskin, vol. xiii, London: George Allen, 1904, p. 484. 2 Collection of the Tate Britain. 3 Private collection, United Kingdom. 4 John Ruskin in Ruskin on pictures: volume 1, Turner at the National Gallery and in Mr Ruskin’s collection, E.T. Cook (ed.), London: George Allen, 1902, p. 361. 5 John James Ruskin to John Ruskin, 21 December 1851, quoted in Ian Warrell, Through Switzerland with Turner: Ruskin’s first selection from the Turner Bequest, London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1995, p. 17.