The many and varied responses to both the landscape, and the people who inhabited it, were well documented by the many colonists who recorded their thoughts for posterity in journals, memoirs, or letters.
But it was to the painters and poets that the colony, and those interested observers in England, turned to give voice to these sharpening and defining preoccupations.
The artists and draughtsmen of the colony, like those around them, experienced the sensations of visitors in a foreign land, and also had a role to play in attempting to document and explore the unique environment in which they found themselves. In the process, they had to find new ways of painting, or of adapting the processes of drawing and painting with which they were familiar, to encompass the unfamiliar sights they witnessed. As the early decades of the colonies coincided with radical changes in the European art world and the later development of Impressionism, some artists were more successful than others. But the process of finding ways in which to describe the landscape of Australia, on canvas as well as in words, was a relatively lengthy and difficult one.
Bearing in mind Ruskin’s assurance, one of the most difficult lessons to be learned was what we might dub the Quest for the Perfect Gum Leaf. European painters (like the writers who were their contemporaries), used to seeing deciduous trees and conifers, had a great deal of difficulty finding appropriate techniques to enable them to depict the leaves of many of the trees in the country around them. They simply could not properly perceive, let alone find ways of painting, leaves that bore little resemblance to those with which they were familiar.
Marcus Clarke’s complaint of “trees without shade” (1894: xi) echoed Field’s grumbling, and were shared by many. Indeed it took several generations of artists to realise the implications of Darwin’s observation that the leaves hung in different ways (up and down, and edgewise, instead of horizontal), and to find ways and means of representing this tiny but enormously meaningful difference. Of course, similar battles were occurring over differences in colours, terrain, perspectives, and particularly light.
One of the first popular colonial painters was the pastoralist John Glover (1767-1849), and in his work we can find many of the tensions which characterised early colonial painting and poetry.
Glover emigrated from England in 1831, and his first landscape paintings of the Tasmanian bush were exhibited in London in 1835. “There is a remarkable peculiarity in the trees in this country; however numerous they rarely prevent you tracing through them the whole distant landscape,” he wrote in the catalogue for his 1835 exhibition. (Smith, 1960: 196) It is Glover’s representations of the eucalypts that attract most attention today. He used the split-brush technique to render impressions of the foliage, but his dark, twisted tree trunks and branches are, like those of von Guerard, evocative of Clarke’s “weird melancholy”.
“It is possible almost everywhere to drive a carriage as easily as in a Gentlemen’s Park in England,” Glover wrote in his note to Milles Plain. With a marvellous Ben Lomond towering in the background, the wide blue sky unknown to many of his European contemporaries, and the vast plains dotted with eucalypts (unconsciously painted as if planted in rows), Milles Plain (1836) is one of the early attempts at combining the pastoral picturesque with the realities of the landscape.
The foreground is populated by a small group of Aboriginal people, sitting about their fires and coming home from a hunting expedition. Bernard Smith argues that Glover’s representations of Aboriginal people are hostile, in accordance with his views of them as a menace to landholders. Glover’s son was instrumental in the destruction of the local population, and wrote in 1831, “the only alternative now is, if they do not readily become friendly, to annihilate them at once”. (Smith, 1960: 268)
Perhaps not surprisingly, then, Glover’s most convincing painting is of his own home, Patterdale, in Glover’s House and Garden (1840). In this work, he creates a cottage-garden oasis in the midst of an alien and dry Milles Plain. The plants in the foreground are lupins and foxgloves; in the background, ancient tree ferns and low scrub. A straight and narrow path leads from the foreground to the substantial homestead buildings, giving form to an otherwise shapeless vista. The garden, and Glover’s painting of it, form a symbolic and powerful reminder of the process of improvement and the colonists’ faith in progress.
The work of Glover’s younger contemporary, Conrad Martens (1801-78), is symbolic of one of the other trends we have identified in the colonists’ psychological responses to landscape: that of documenting in detail the world of the antipodes. Similar to the botanical cataloguing of Banks, and the Expatriate syntax in literature identified by Hodge and Mishra (see 2.6), this thread of realism is evident in the topographical exactness that Martens championed.
Influenced by Turner, Martens had also travelled in the Pacific and around South America (including a stint sailing along the Patagonian coast with Darwin on the Beagle) and was therefore familiar with landscapes other than rural England, and particularly interested in seascapes and coastline.
As he argued in 1851, painters had to find the balance between botanical exactitude and romantic grandeur: “we have occasionally great arguments about the necessity of preserving the character and true delineation of the trees, plants, etc. in the landscapes of this country, a point which I have ever considered of great consequence so long as it does not amount to absolute servility”. (Smith, 1960: 313)
One of the great masters of romantic grandeur was Eugen von Guerard (1811-1901), who arrived in Australia in 1853, travelled widely throughout the eastern colonies and New Zealand, and stayed to paint and teach until 1881. His exhibitions in London at the Royal Academy (1873) and the US (in 1876) were instrumental in the development of the European perception of Australia and its flora.
Von Guerard’s great vistas, representations of the Snowy region's mountain peaks and enormous expanses, reflected the colonists’ preoccupation with distance and space. Man and beast are dwarfed by the landscape in von Guerard’s works, again reflecting a spiritual philosophy of the insignificance of humanity in the great scheme of Creation. This Romantic view of both nature and humanity, clear in the work of Charles Harpur (see 4.1.4) and strongly held into the late 19th century, was an integral part of many colonists’ understanding of the country to which they had come, and the people who inhabited it.
At the same time, but working within a totally different visual framework, it was the Swiss-born Abram-Louis Buvelot (1814-1888) who finally found both vision and technique to match the landscape he was painting, and who came to be honoured as the father of Australian landscape painting.
Like Martens, he had travelled widely, and studied under leading European drawing and painting masters. With a palette of golds and blues which inspired the later Heidelberg School, Buvelot captured the elusive nature of the light of eastern Australia in paintings such as Summer Evening Near Templestowe (1866) and Winter Morning Near Heidelberg (1866). The vistas and horizons diminish in importance in comparison with the light, a movement reflective of the radical changes being wrought in European painting by Buvelot’s contemporaries such as Manet and Pissarro (the famous Salon des Refusés exhibition was held in 1863).
In contrast to the terrifying Tasmania of Glover or the grandiose vision of von Guerard, Buvelot’s “improved landscape” of rural Victoria is welcoming, drenched with light, and real.
He was also one of the first to be able to accurately structure the eucalypts and myrtles, particularly in his drawings, and realise the different growing patterns and shapes of the leaves. As the art critic for the Argus wrote in 1879: “Buvelot has revealed all sorts of previously unnoticed beauties in our indigenous timber and foliage and has caused us to look upon our sylvan scenery with something like a new sense of vision”. (Argus, 11 September, 1879)
The picturesque of Rosa, the dreamy light of Claude, the depth of Turner, the clarity and colour of the Pre-Raphaelites: all of these schools enabled different visions, but none provided an comprehensive answer. It took until the end of the century, as the Impressionists in far-off France shook the art world, for a new generation of Australian-based painters to find the tools which enabled them to comprehend and paint their own light and landscape: and that all-important single leaf.