Arthur Streeton

My education finished early at State School, Punt Road South Yarra and in 1880 at 13 years of age I was office boy in George Rolfe Co Bourke Street. There I arrived at 8am and left to walk back [home] to South Yarra about 6pm. I carried down to Customs House two cheques £2,000 and £1,500 which paid duty on Brandy, Rum etc required by the Russian Fleet at Sandridge [now Port Melbourne] — the Kelly gang filled the newspapers at the time [second half of 1881] ... From then I worked in two wholesale soft goods firms — next apprenticed with Charles Troedel Lithographer.

From Arthur Streeton's Notes for memoirs

Arthur Streeton (1867—1943) painted most of the works he produced as a youth (watercolours and small oils) at locations near his home and his workplace. During the 1870s and 1880s (except for long periods spent at Heidelberg in the late 1880s) he lived with his parents, first in Punt Road, South Yarra, and then at addresses within a couple of kilometres of Punt Road, across the Yarra River. His subjects were familiar places which he could reach easily before and after work. Near to home he painted the Yarra in the vicinity of Punt Road, the Friendly Society Gardens and Brander's Ferry; near his workplace he painted scenes at Princes Bridge and at the wharves of Sandridge and Fisherman's Bend. On Sundays he made trips about two kilometres along the Yarra to paint at Alphington and Merri Creek.

In 1882 when he was almost fifteen Streeton enrolled as a night student at the National Gallery of Victoria School of Design. (He was to attend for seven years.) Students had to reach a satisfactory level of accomplishment in these classes before they were permitted to attend the painting school. His drawings were competent if uninspired and although he showed some works in the annual students' exhibitions and was sometimes commended, he was never singled out for a prize.

Streeton was to remember that it had taken considerable determination to persist with the classes after a full day's work. In the School of Design he was taught 'drawing from the round, from flat examples and from the living model'. There was no tuition in painting as such even though students were encouraged to sketch in oils or watercolour from still life, both at the school and in their own time. The year that Streeton enrolled, George Folingsby (1828—1891) became Head of the School of Design and his doctrine (a reversal of previous practice) was that there was to be a minimum of copying from illustrations.

Oswald Campbell, who was Streeton's drawing teacher until 1885, and then Frederick McCubbin, encouraged outdoor work. Campbell had fostered a sketch club which had been set up in 1880 by students of the School of Design. In 1882 it became known as the Victorian Sketching Club. Streeton may have belonged to it since two of his sketching spots at Alphington and Merri Creek were also places favoured in those years by the club.

Streeton appears to have shown artistic promise after he began using oils. He had already achieved some proficiency in the technique by 1886, when his oil paintings pleased Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts as well as James Smith, reviewer for the Argus. Streeton reported to a Melbourne weekly in 1889 that it was McCubbin who first encouraged him to paint in oils. McCubbin had advised Streeton 'to "go steadily for painting" and ... offered to give [him] advice and assistance whenever he wanted it'.

McCubbin, however, was not the only artist to have a profound impact on Streeton. In later life he described more than once the influence of Tom Roberts on him and his peers when they saw the small oil sketches Roberts brought back from Europe in 1885. Streeton's special memory was of the way Roberts had painted the quiet glow in the eastern sky in the early evening.

As a rule Streeton did not linger over the painting of a picture; he quickly acquired a brilliant technical facility and almost a musician's notion of performance.

There are three versions of this image, all small oil sketches. (The Yarra at South Yarra) and (View on the Yarra) each have a sound provenance. The third, (Figures in landscape), is either a fake or a copy that somehow acquired Streeton's initials on the image; it is not discussed further.

But why should Streeton paint even two versions? If he was thinking of making a large painting for which these were preparatory studies it did not eventuate. In any case these sketches are unusual for preparatory studies: they are extremely sketchy and the differences between them are slight.

Streeton painted in the light of a setting sun which gilded distant buildings on the horizon. While some light glimmers on the lower river bank the steep wooded hill is in deep shadow. The light is an afterglow rather than an early sunset so it is not possible to say categorically that the view is towards the west, although the flattening of the hillside into a black silhouette makes a westward view likely.

There are few pictorial features to identify the site: a hill, water, a small building in the middle ground and a suggestion (no more) of buildings on the horizon. Looking along a bank there is water on the left and land on the right. The river (or lake) appears to continue around the tongue of land in the middle ground and to flow below the hill. The two small roofs on the right side of the image seem to belong to a thatched cottage with a fence in front.

The paint has been worked over a brittle chalky preparation to which the oil paint has not adhered particularly well. In some places where the paint had come away clumsy repairs have been made in a purple colour over the original dammar varnish, a retouching so crude it could be assumed this was done a long time ago and possibly by the artist.

On the question of whether Streeton painted (The Yarra at South Yarra) from nature or from a first sketch the artist's technique could be informative. A cardboard support was pinned in the upper centre, the pin remaining in place until after the paint had dried. Paint was applied with a small, flat brush about a half-centimetre wide and the speed of execution varied. Unhurried dabs of paint describe the shadowy hill: neat, plain touches which fill in the area without defining distance, geological formations or foliage. Longer, freer strokes describe the foreground.

The panel was not painted in one session. Two trees in the background have been painted in dark green over brown when the paint underneath was fairly dry. In the foreground Streeton painted wet in wet, in places slurring dark paint of a buttery consistency into equally wet white paint.

Two years later, twilight and half-light subjects provided the majority of Streeton's contributions to the 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition and were considered to be the most successful of his exhibits.

On the Friday afternoon of 20 April 1888, Miss Fanny Barbour attended the opening of Grosvenor Chambers, a four-storey building at 9 Collins Street, Melbourne. It had been designed and built by the entrepreneur and professional decorator Charles Stewart Paterson — dubbed 'the pioneer of art decoration in Victoria' — to house the fashionable artists and dressmakers of rich and marvellous Melbourne.

While there, Miss Barbour went with a group of friends of aesthetic sensibility to see Tom Roberts who then occupied one of the smaller, low-rental studios on the mezzanine level between the first and second floors. For the opening of the Chambers, Tom Roberts had decorated his studio with paintings by himself, Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin and the young English painter, George Walton.

Miss Barbour's impression of the studio and the pictures was on the whole unfavourable: 'the room was so small and crowded it was hard to see anything'. Though she liked The midday rest 1888 by McCubbin 'very much' she had a decidedly negative reaction to the other paintings: 'I don't think Tom Robarts [sic] has improved, he has such scarlet fever sort of sunsets. McCubbin said one of Streeton's was the best in the room, [but I] didn't like it.'

One of the works decorating the studio was Streeton's large canvas Pastoral. It may have been the work Fanny Barbour 'didn't like' but others most emphatically did. As well as dubbing it the best work in the show, McCubbin later emulated its composition and colour in some of his own paintings.

In the art circles of Melbourne any work commended by a star such as 'Prof' McCubbin as being 'the best in the room' was likely to achieve instant recognition. Before the exhibition closed, Pastoral, priced high at £60, had been sold to Charles Stewart Paterson, the Grosvenor Chambers entrepreneur. (Brother of painter John Ford Paterson, Charles was something of a painter himself, albeit an amateur.) Streeton was elated. Later he said that this sale and another from the same exhibition, that of Settler's camp (to Charles Raymond Staples for £52.10.0), enabled him to relinquish his apprenticeship as a lithographer and pursue painting in earnest. Within a few months he had found a place to live at Eaglemont, Heidelberg, where he settled down to paint full time.

Over the years there have been questions raised about the site of Pastoral. Some say it was painted at Heidelberg; however, an inscription on the back of a photograph of the painting written by Streeton (in the 1920s or 1930s) leaves no doubt that it was 'painted at Box Hill, 1888'.

For the small winter impression, Hoddle St., 10 p.m., Streeton asked one guinea at the 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition in 1889. The panel is smaller than 9 by 5 inches, more likely 9 by 3 inches, which accounts for the price of only one guinea.

It is a night scene, composed of those bruised colours — deep mauves and browns and sulky green-yellows — such as still characterise the never absolutely black skies of Melbourne at night. Pricking the heavy atmosphere here and there are yellow street lights. Two or three yellow windows glow from some of the small houses and there are yellow and red lamps on the left side of a horse-drawn hansom cab. The black figures of half a dozen pedestrians show up in the street. Although chock-full of traffic by day, Hoddle Street was quiet at ten o'clock on a winter's night.

On the left side of the image the pavement extends the full length of the street apparently uninterrupted by cross-streets. It is bordered by a fence enclosing a deep garden or park — there is foliage but as far as can be made out no houses or lights of houses. On the same side, at the top of the rise on the horizon, is the square outline of a building. On the right side there is at least one narrow side street, perhaps two or more, whose entry points are masked by the hansom cab. The pedestrian traffic and small-sized dwellings as well as the tall building seen in outline in a cross-street were all typical of an inner Melbourne suburb such as Richmond or Collingwood.

Streeton set up his portable easel (on which was a cardboard panel pinned to a backing board) on the extreme lefthand side of the street. Judging from the size of the panel and the number of brushstrokes, the painting took approximately half an hour to complete. The artist worked swiftly, using a square brush less than one centimetre in width. The paint was of a slightly stiffer consistency (because of the cold) than the fluid medium he used in some of his pastoral paintings, which were painted on warm summer days. A few hairs, parted from the other bristles, were used to paint fine details.

Streeton deftly suggests atmosphere, lighting, depth and width of space while evoking the people, houses and the hansom cab through his use of colours in various tints, touches and mixtures. Any one small area of the painting contains all, or almost all, of the colours. The warmest colour in this chilly image is a tinge of pale orange mixed with chartreuse at the top of the street.

Hoddle St., 10 p.m. was painted some weeks before the 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition was held. The paint was still slightly tacky when Streeton incised his initials into it and put the work into a frame. He then painted the frame with the drying painting in place; in the process, the paint sloshed over the edges and there are small dots of bronze here and there on the image.

Although the artist has not resorted to bold or risk-taking measures in rendering this work he has nevertheless succeeded in capturing a sense of the stifling heat and painful stillness so often typical of the Australian countryside.

He painted quickly, thinly and with dexterity, allowing the texture of the canvas to show over most of the image. Unusually, the surface was not varnished, perhaps to retain its texture. Streeton evidently wanted a semi-transparent effect to match the delicacy of pale new green grass appearing through the cropped yellow pasture; hence, the work was executed without either the slashes and dashes of paint he so often employed or the fast, twirling drawing of tree trunks and branches that characterised his more mannered paintings of the mid to late 1890s.

Two small trees on the left are thinly outlined as a dappled definition against a mild sky. The mossy-brown coloured foliage of the trees by the road is particularly soft. The palette he used of acid greens, yellow and china blue, mixed with a lot of white and painted thinly, is almost subdued. The road is white, the sky a clear mid-blue and the atmosphere slightly hazy. There are no bright accents in red or brilliant blue, not even for the lone horse and rider on the brow of the hill, although if one looks closely they are painted in blue, pink and white. Streeton reworked this part of the picture, using a thicker paint and creamy, paddled brushwork over the sky and roadside cutting.

The dark oak frame around Sunlight — wide, flat and stepped back —is the original, probably chosen by Streeton in 1896.

Streeton sailed from Australia on the French ship Polynesien, boarding in Sydney on Wednesday, 27 January 1897. The Polynesien called at Melbourne and Adelaide, reaching Port Said (the port for which he had booked) in late February.

Late in life, Streeton remembered arriving in Cairo 'at night to pass through strange crowded thoroughfares & [a] perfumed garden way to [the] Hotel'.

Daylight impressions of the city were of crowds; the exotic Arab people 'in long gowns of a dozen degrees of blue'; the pungent odours of spices, donkeys and manure; the richly coloured and patterned bazaars selling brass goods, slippers, perfumes, spices and cloths; and the architecture, with its grand scale and impressive height. Streeton's impressions were vividly romantic, especially by comparison with those of other contemporary travellers to the same places and things.

(House builders, Cairo) shows house builders on the upper level of a high-walled structure, their activity eclipsed by a square of brilliant yellow awning on a balcony just below. Streeton's overriding interest in this picture was the arrangement of colour and design rather than the subject.

Oriental or exotic cultures held a degree of fascination for a number of late nineteenth-century painters. For many, the unusual architecture and brilliant colours found in places like Egypt offered a wealth of subject matter. But how was such exoticism to be captured? Many chose to emphasise the picturesque clutter, the architectural convolutions and the decaying masonry of the cities. Streeton, an impressionist, chose the light above all else, selecting a palette and a compositional type to suit. His images of Cairo appear clean and crisp by comparison with those of some other travel painters of the period. However, the experience of seeing and recording glaring sunlight would not have been new to Streeton as it would have been to artists from the very different climate of northern Europe.

Though he was familiar with the bright light he found in Cairo, Streeton decidedly viewed other facets of the city as having all the reported power and mysticism of the East. (He was well placed to make such an observation, possessing an extensive library of Oriental literature.) While in Egypt, he gave himself wholeheartedly to exploring the Oriental genre. In a letter back home he referred to 'the playground of Cleopatra' and, in later memoirs, to Aida, The Thousand and One Nights and to the Old Testament. He described Arabic text written on the walls of the Sultan Hassan as being 'large and simple like the handwriting of a God'.

After six or seven weeks, Streeton left Egypt for Naples, passing through Paris. By the first week of May 1897 he was in London with a number of Egyptian and Italian sketches in his baggage. Cairo and Naples were the subjects of the first works he painted in London. However, a proposed London exhibition of Eastern subjects never eventuated. It appears no one there was interested, and so Streeton sent the paintings back to Australia, in parcels a few at a time.

The first owner of (House builders, Cairo) was Melbourne businessman and grazier, Robert Officer Blackwood (1861—1940), who purchased more than ten works by Streeton including two Cairo subjects between the 1890s and 1914.

The best of all sights in Cairo, according to Streeton in 1897, were the bazaars and the mosques 'with the grand large design'. A child of the British Empire, he was pleased to note that the English held 'the city by the citadel on the rise of a neighbouring hill, and with their guns could in a few minutes shell the palaces, mosques — in fact the whole place'.

Out of choice Streeton painted colourful tourist views of Cairo while hinting at the different political reality. Cairo street is a romantic interpretation of the city's huge and glittering architecture, one impervious to the passage of time and history while sheltering along its flanks the flimsy awnings and busy commerce of modern Egypt.

While in Egypt Streeton sketched a diversity of images: the mosques; the sixty-foot doorway of the mosque known as Sultan Hassan; the minarets, walls and stairs; the bazaars; the Sphinx in 'the calm immensity of the grey Lybian desert'; the Ezbekiyeh Gardens opposite the Opera House (where he attended a performance of Aida); the drink vendors at outdoor cafes; and the secretive high-walled streets where the wealthy Egyptians lived.

Like most of Streeton's Cairo scenes, Cairo street was painted in London from scenes sketched in Cairo, aided by memory, The scene is a street of the Grand Bazaar leading to one of the entrances of the striped mosque known as El-Shafei. Although appearing huge in relation to the stalls and people in Streeton's image the mosque was actually small by comparison with the neighbouring mosques, Sultan Hassan and El-Rilai.

Streeton was sent a postcard of Cairo which shows the comparative size of the three mosques. Under the wall, positioned very low, are many flimsy awnings of outdoor bazaars. Streeton has included the awnings and some of their props but omitted the wall to which they were attached. Thus, the arched passageway is connected on the right to a wall whose top has acquired a corner at odds with its lower planarity. The large niche is also unexplained. All in all, capturing the huge scale and height of Cairo’s architecture which so impressed Streeton was to elude him when it came to describing the grand effect in paint.

The first part of the title of this work has been taken from the inscription 'Sydney Harbour', which was written by the artist on the reverse of the canvas at the time he signed the painting. The other part has been taken from the title 'Souvenir of Little Sirius', which was given later, after Streeton's death.

It is thought that Sydney Harbour may not have been painted in Sydney but later in London. It is hardly a representative view of either the Cove or the Harbour. The most that can be claimed is that it seems to describe the eastern shore of Sirius Cove from the inner end, with a puzzling outlook offered over the Harbour to a distant view of an island or headland (perhaps Garden Island) and an indeterminate glimpse of the further shore (Elizabeth and Rushcutters bays).

The image incorporates more than one angle of vision which, together with the evidence of radical changes of scale and the vague description of place, suggests it was not painted on site. Streeton could not have stood at any one position and seen the trees so extraordinarily tall and the coastline running up the image like a map — it is as if he were simultaneously painting from the air and close to the ground. Streeton possibly relied on his memory of the topography and was not in a position to check that he had painted it accurately.

He painted a number of imaginary compositions in the mid-1890s, although his talent was best exercised in 'plein-air' painting when he saw his subject whole and translated it on canvas.

Frolicking figures such as the sprites in Sydney Harbour appear in his work from the mid-1890s. Several paintings contain a similar group, particularly the central figure who leans forward with legs together, head tucked almost out of sight and arms spread wide in a long continuous curve.

Sydney Harbour was worked and reworked by the artist, the composition altering in the process. Although Streeton seems never at any stage to have deviated from his initial poetic conception, he fiddled with almost every part of the image in struggling to describe the landscape. The trees at one stage were more numerous, extending almost across the sky.

Through many reworkings of the canvas Streeton retained only one guide from his original: the horizon line — the bit of sand edging the shore at Garden Island and a glimpse of the same straw colour above the city — remained unchanged.

Some of Streeton's difficulty in resolving the image was a result of his discovering glazing. He applied glaze over glaze and opaque colours over glazes: once embarked on the practice, however, he found it an 'all too slippery technique!'

Two contending philosophies of art directed Streeton: a desire to capture on canvas his spontaneous delight in the world around him, and a conscious concern to promote his career through acquiring a sophisticated knowledge of European art.

He took his first lesson from his mentor, Tom Roberts, who advised 'looking into the deep, quiet face of nature'. The understated poetry of such an approach was endorsed in an influential lecture to Melbourne artists delivered in 1889 by Professor Laurie. Laurie read extracts from the poems of Robert Browning to demonstrate that modern painting 'thought nothing too mean or commonplace for it to touch'.

It was believed at the time that Australian artists had a lot to learn from the art of older countries. Yet, in Laurie's words, they also had a responsibility 'to take native scenery and paint it as it appeared to them in all the beauty of atmospheric effect ... [holding it up] to the unaccustomed eyes of those who had no conception of its natural loveliness'.

The period 1889—90 in Melbourne, long remembered as the last phase of a prosperity that began with the gold rushes, also saw the first flowering of Australian impressionism: it was the time of the Heidelberg School; it was also a time Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and Charles Conder remembered with nostalgia; for most Australians it remains a very evocative period in the history of Australian art.

At this time, the well-known panorama as seen from Mount Eagle near Heidelberg was the subject of some of Streeton's best-known paintings. It was also one that he described poetically in his later letters:

I sit on our hill of gold, on the north side, the wind seems sunburnt & firey as it runs through my beard. — Yes rather, see look there: north-east the very long divide is beautiful, warm blue far far away all dreaming & remote ... Yes I sit here in the upper circle surrounded by copper & gold & smile joy under my fly net as all the light, glory & quivering brightness passes slowly & freely before my eyes.

During the mid-1890s when Streeton spent time at the Curlew Camp — one of the many bachelor camps under canvas around Sydney Harbour — he planted and tended a garden around his and Roberts's tent and wrote wistfully about the joy of living in the most beautiful and benign natural setting possible:

Saturday 9pm in our tent at Mossman's Bay — the front of our tent thrown open wide, & the night sky is deep green blue, & below the great hill the bay reaches down into a deep wonderful gulf, under the sea — picnic parties pulling about quietly through the rare phosphorescence, steamers puffing, breathing heavily & fluting away, & all with me is melody.

The need to study great works of art sent Streeton abroad in 1897 — he was then thirty. In England he patiently emulated the styles and subjects of Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and other 'masters'.

However, while he had been at the forefront of the art scene in Australia, in England Streeton was a nobody. His paintings did not sell. He fell in love but could not marry because he was so poor. (Having experienced in Australia the economic depression that began in 1890, he was then to endure a further eight years of poverty in London after his arrival there in 1897.)

This situation was to change after the phenomenal financial success of his 1907 exhibition in Melbourne, which he organised entirely himself with the help of his brother Herbert. Recouping €2,000 in pictures sold, it was immediately noted as a landmark in the history of Australian art and a signpost in Streeton's career. It could fairly be said that from then on he courted success as assiduously as 'pure' artistic achievement.

As he reported to his photographer friend H. Walter Barnett on 16 August 1907:

I have done as well in Sydney as I expected. My show sold about €350 — & brought commissions for panels of the harbour. I have done several in one sitting of 1 1/2 to 2 hours work 20 guineas & I've sold 3 for 25 guineas size 26 by 7 inches including 10/6 dark oak frames.

Undoubtedly, Streeton chose subjects he knew would appeal. 'They only want their harbour', he wrote to Tom Roberts from Sydney in 1907 and he painted no fewer than 145 views of the Harbour between 1907 and 1927.

This painting, evidently an image of Richmond Park, London, was painted when Streeton was first in love with his 'dear violinist', Nora Clench. For a while she was his muse — so strong, so wise, so sensitive, she would, he thought, 'have been a fit companion for Keats'.

In mid-1899, they went together to the Guildhall in London to see an exhibition of works by J.M.W. Turner (1775—1851) who, by that time, had acquired status as a great progenitor of modern English painting. Heightened by the excitement of being in love, Streeton was enraptured by the tremendous range and wonderful tones as well as the colour, beauty and imagination of Turner's work. For the next few years, he devoted himself to the subjects and light effects Turner had explored until 'by a certain coterie he was hailed as the Australian Turner'.

Shortly after visiting the Turner exhibition and while the paintings were still vividly in mind, Streeton and Nora spent all of one long midsummer's day in Richmond Park, the scene of some of Turner's most evocative images of London:

We sat under dozens of different very old oaks, and after this ... [from] twilight till 10 0'clock we walked near the river under the terrace of Richmond Hill — No day in my life I think has been so happy.

(Sunlight in the wood) shows the curve of Richmond Hill above the terrace. A patch of late afternoon light in the trees catches the figures of two women walking there. A third woman appears in shadow below. The image of a group of dark trees on a slope, lit within its shadow by a pool of light, was a quotation from the right side of the largest painting Turner ever made, England: Richmond Hill on the Prince Regent's Birthday 1819 (Tate Gallery). This motif was often repeated by Turner, as Streeton must have noticed in the paintings at the Guildhall and the National Gallery.

The original owners of this painting, the Melbourne collectors Felix and Mary Meyer, were cavalier about the titles and dates of the many paintings they owned; they did not record such information on the backs of the works and kept no records of their purchases. The title (Sunlight in the wood) has been ascribed from one in the catalogue of Streeton's second Australian exhibition, held in Sydney in July 1907.

The painting may be dated to the first years of this century: stylistically, by its dark palette, extreme juxtapositions of light and dark, boldly clumped composition and wet, wriggly brushwork; technically, by the cheap pigments (paintings with this extreme crocodiling of dark colour belong to the turn of the century, a time when Streeton was unlikely to have been able to afford more expensive materials); historically, by the women's costumes which were conventional outdoors wear at the time; and by the canvas stamp — Charles West, frame maker and artists' supplier, operated a shop in the north-west region of London where Streeton lived (at Hampstead) between 1900 and 1902

As for (Sunlight in the wood), a number of features also date this work to the first years of this century: its near monochrome palette; the mist which dissolves the complex details and three-dimensional solidity of landscape into rudimentary flat shapes; and specific mannerisms, such as the cloud streaming with light, and the tall, clumped elm tree. The first two features are stylistic characteristics typical of much European painting of the time, and the specific mannerisms refer back to the early nineteenth-century artists Constable and Turner.

During those first years in England, Streeton was aware of following, at times closely, in the footsteps of his British contemporary Philip Wilson Steer (1860—1942). He wrote about Steer in a number of his letters to Tom Roberts with a mixed sense of resignation and pique. Steer was one of those who controlled the cliquish, powerful New English Art Club into whose exhibitions Streeton had tried — mostly in vain — to hang some of his own paintings:

I tried the R.A. New English & International — with the usual negative result ... Steer is their great landscape painter ... I think I prefer [Alfred] East [1849—1913] — he has more variety ... Damme. I'll do better than either with the next few years, or else I've missed my mark entirely ... Steer, who is always amiable when I see him, does not like my work: well I'm competing with him.

The historical position of Steer and Streeton in the art of their respective countries is similar: in the late 1880s Steer had been foremost in English impressionism; at the same time Streeton had been one of the leaders of Australian impressionism.

Streeton, like Steer, worshipped Turner and visited a number of sites Turner had painted. Constable had painted and sketched the wide heath and skies above Hampstead Heath, particularly the view west from the heath over the Branch Pond towards Harrow. Streeton also painted Hampstead Heath, even tackling the view towards Harrow that Constable favoured.

Constable painted the heath's trees — meagre, wind-beaten stands of elm, ash and oak. Similar trees with a curiously clinging foliage also appear in Streeton's landscape. Like Constable, who was by this time famous for his many oil studies of the skies above Hampstead, Streeton too made a feature of a huge sky shot with rays of watery sunlight through steamy clouds.

Between 1900 and December 1902, Streeton lived near Hampstead Heath at No. 2 The Mall, Church Road, Park Hill Road, Hampstead. Hampstead Heath was then an area of around 300 hectares of unspoiled semi-wild heathland, of grassy slopes and wooded areas with groups of ponds. The views include, in clear weather, the Hertfordshire ridges, the Surrey hills, Windsor Castle and the Chilterns, as well as an outlook towards Harrow Hill.

On the strength of the financial success of his 1907 trip to Australia, Arthur Streeton married Nora Clench in London on 11 January 1908. In May they went to Venice for their honeymoon. There are photographs of the couple in gondolas, seated at outdoor restaurants and walking the narrow streets of the city.

Both Streeton and Nora painted. 'What a wonderful place it is', he wrote. 'We stayed in a charming place in the Zattere — 3 old sisters Italian kept the place, most dear old ladies and as kind as any relatives could be and much more so than most — and I worked hard and did some good pieces.' They returned in June to their home at No. 10 Hill Road, St John's Wood, London; however, Streeton was not satisfied that he had produced sufficient work for an exhibition of Venetian subjects he had planned for the next year. In October he (and perhaps Nora as well) returned to stay again at the Palazzo di Biosi in the Zattere.

London reviews of Streeton's exhibition the following year noticed the 'quick, nervous touch' and the speed and sketchiness, indicating perhaps a 'fear of losing the spirit of the hour and the quality of the light'.

Streeton painted from the Riva Schiavoni near the Bridge of Sighs, looking across the canal to the Dogana (its gilded globe visible in the left of the painting) and to Santa Maria della Salute. Almost the same view had been painted by Walter Sickert in 1896.

Streeton covered the standard size Reeves canvas swiftly (using a technique almost like that for watercolour), painting the water in sideways strokes with some lines of fine dark blue. The foreground and upper sky are painted with a bigger brush and larger, heavier, darker strokes; the distant view where the dome of Santa Maria della Salute meets the turquoise sky is painted in smaller strokes of paler blended tints.

Streeton used the conventional recipe for aerial perspective very interestingly in this picture. Working with a round brush of about one centimetre in diameter throughout, he blended some areas in a criss-cross pattern of strokes and stacked strokes horizontally in others. He sometimes dragged the paint, allowing gaps of putty-coloured canvas to show freely.

An inscription on the reverse of the painting in the National Collection indicates that the probable year of production was 1910 rather than 1911 — the date indicated by Streeton in 1935.

Most, if not all, of Streeton's very many flower paintings of the 1920s and 1930s possess an ingenuous quality, indicating an absolute concentration on the subject: the flowers (their texture, colours and almost their smell); and the container of glazed pottery, silver or glass. By contrast, earlier flower studies by Streeton were excuse for a luxurious play of purely painterly concerns, a play arising from and combined with the form and evocative suggestions of the flower.

In this painting the flowers spread over the canvas in a diffuse spray, a presentation that would have been inconceivable later on when the artist had foregone such disorderly pleasures. Licks of green paint with pale accents of white and mauve describe and blur the foliage, the flowers and the broad glass container and melt darkly into the dim ground. Emerging from this essentially decorative textured surface are cobwebby stems whose spidery criss- crossing accentuates the surface of the canvas and helps to stabilise the design.

The painting, together with other flower paintings by Streeton, was reviewed in the Victorian Artists' Society journal in 1914:

A feature of this exhibition not to be overlooked is the attention given to the study of flowers and still life. There is a popular illusion —or is it a delusion? — that flower painting is an exercise only fitted for the inept amateur, and dabbler in art. In the face of this opinion Mr Streeton has painted and hung in his show, tulips, hyacinths, violets, primroses, campanulas, chrysanthemums and one fine study of Michaelmis [sic] dissies [sic].

Streeton established his own 'patent' to certain subjects, most notably the Harbour; he also claimed certain colours, for example the famous 'Streeton blue'. He adapted European visions to Australian ends, as when he painted the Harbour with a 'suggestion' that was 'Turneresque'. The paintings brought to mind something the viewer already knew: '[T]hese most hackneyed subjects of landscape art, when they come under Mr Streeton's broad and fluent brush, present a freshness of appeal, as though they had been left for him to discover', wrote the Age reviewer.

Streeton's ability to select images reverberant with meaning for his Australian audience made his late career significant in Australian art history. In 1935, the influential art writer Lionel Lindsay described Streeton's artistic appropriation in national terms Streeton was painting 'the quintessential Australia'.

In the same year, the equally influential art writer and gallery director, J.S. MacDonald, expressed his opinion that the pastoral theme in Streeton's art represented an ideal Australia: 'For me, Streeton's major canvases have in them music akin to great overtures, golden, morning stuff, melodious and Grecian. To me they point to the way in which life should be lived in Australia, with the maximum of flocks and the minimum of factories.'

Streeton's reputation as the pre-eminent creator of national images was at its height in the mid-1920s. To his surprise his fame survived the rigours of an exhibition held at election time in 1925 when virtually every work sold.

A torn label on the reverse of the painting identifies the subject as the Grampians, in the Western District of Victoria. It was painted during Streeton's first painting trip to the Grampians in the spring of 1920. Most likely it was included in the first exhibition of those subjects in November 1920 and probably it was 'The Grampians from the plain' (Cat. 12).

The sheep country belongs to the most successful type of national image produced after the Great War, that of the Australian pastoral. Streeton's first paintings in that genre — images of sunburnt grassy plains, gum trees, grazing sheep and a river against a low backdrop of blue ranges — were painted in the vicinity of Heidelberg in the late 1880s, the best known being Golden summer, Eaglemont 1889.

In London Streeton dreamed of the Australian pastoral, sketching, and often writing about it in his letters back to Australia: 'Dear hills of Heidelberg! How Time flies the long brown summer hills and the blue Dandenongs. I shall never — never — forget them.'

In the spring of 1920 he visited farmlands at the foot of the Grampians which offered the ideal pastoral image. The sheep country was painted during his stay at Harry Armytage's farm at Dunkeld. During a later visit to the Grampians in 1926, when he stayed at Walter Cain's farm at Willaura, Streeton produced another pastoral image, conceptually very similar, Land of the Golden Fleece.

'I hope to go out to and paint among the "Grampians" — I've never been there', wrote Streeton on 13 August 1920. Later that year he stayed at Harry Armytage's place at Dunkeld and found at least three subjects in the vicinity that established new themes for his art: the single red gum tree standing against the sun; the sheep country of the rich Western District plains; and the worn-down volcanic hills bordering those plains, such as depicted in Hall's Gap, the Grampians.

With paintings such as these Streeton was able to sustain his reputation in Australia after World War I as a painter with a fresh vision. Reviewers of the paintings of the Grampians shown in November 1920 liked the concept of the Australian landscape they presented as well as their arresting subjects and bold treatment. 'Their appeal is obvious', approved the Age critic who began his review by declaring that the exhibition marked 'the return to [Streeton's] position of pre-eminence ... [as] our greatest landscape painter’.

The paintings of the Grampians were grandly impersonal in subject and broadly painted — 'a big landscape painted in a big way'. The majority included a steep foreground and an outlook over the countryside that was all-encompassing, as if seen through an omnipresent eye. It reintroduced a Romantic and earlier concept of the 'total scene' which had been rejected by the impressionists of Streeton's own generation; they typically painted subjective bits and pieces of the life around them from close range.

Streeton later explained that when painting among the Grampians he had found that his best subjects:

... were visible from the crest of the Peaks; it took an hour's steady climbing laden with canvas colours easel palette lunch & billy of water ... pausing halfway for breath & looking up at the dizzy heights ... But once perched upon the Sundial Peak, above the world, the reward is evident in a vast expanse of pale blue over myriad gums rising to Mount Rosea, or over Boronia Peak to Stawell 20 miles to the East.

As the critic for the Age noted in 1920: 'What Streeton has added to his wonderful technique is a warmer note of sentiment'. Hall's Gap, judged one of 'the two most satisfying pictures in the exhibition' was described as 'a soft fold in the hills behind a stretch of fresh green plain'. The Sydney Morning Herald writer also found it 'an arresting subject, strikingly handled in the contrast between the tender green of level meadows in sunlight, and the grim gigantic mountain walls above'. Streeton was to repeat this effect in other paintings.

The subject of this painting is eight tulips in fluted glass vase on a highly polished table. The work itself is covered with a shiny varnish so the background, which is dark, not only reflects the light but also reflects it differently at change in the direction and thickness of the paint.

The painting is probably identifiable as Tulips, 18 by 14 inches, exhibited in October 1925 at the Fine Art Society's Gallery in Melbourne. Streeton made a note in his copy of the catalogue that the work had been painted that year. It was not mentioned in reviews and not sold.

Streeton first exhibited paintings of tulips in March 1909 in London. The Studio of that month, in reviewing another earlier exhibition — the fourth annual show of flower paintings at the Baillie Galleries — noted that tulips were a popular subject for artists.

Back in Australia Streeton undertook to paint flowers purely for their own sake. He may have been led by his clients' taste for mimicry. But since, like Tom Roberts, he was a devoted gardener it may have also been to please himself that he painted so botanically and repetitively.

Through the 1920s Streeton painted flowers in cut-glass vases many times, perhaps encouraged by praise he received early in the decade: 'Mr Streeton has included ... a painting of a spray of plum blossom in a glass bowl. This simple study, perhaps more than any of the more ambitious canvases, reveals the painter's almost uncanny cleverness', wrote the Age critic in 1920. 'To paint glass without the help of a dominant colour behind it is a problem that most artists would leave severely alone. With a few sure strokes of the brush Mr Streeton has achieved the translucency, the actual brittleness of glass.'

Before 1920 Streeton had produced rather few flower paintings; from then on into the 1930s he painted no fewer than 150, of which the local market readily absorbed a good many. Praise was heaped on the artist, seemingly all for accuracy of his representation. Late in 1931 one admirer, 'hurriedly passing through' the National Art Gallery of New South Wales, is said to have noticed a 'bunch of crimson roses on the wall, so real' as to be almost 'overpowered by the scent'.

There were compositions and colour schemes to which Streeton returned again and again throughout the 1920s. He frequently used a high view when painting Sydney Harbour or Melbourne's bayside. In the Sydney paintings the foreground corner would typically feature a group of dark, strongly modelled banksias (Streeton called them 'honeysuckles') leaning over a stretch of blue water that reached expansively up the picture. At or above mid-point, a headland would jut into the water from one side, usually the side filled lower down with the foreground trees. The colours ran the full gamut, from dark and bright in the foreground to pale and meltingly insubstantial in the far distance.

In the National Collection, paintings as widely spaced in date as South Head, Port Jackson c. 1895, The Harbour from Point Piper 1926 and The Harbour from Kurraba c.1926 are all composed according to this schema. Occasionally Streeton was chided for the formula.

His view for The Harbour from Kurraba was south-west on a sunny afternoon across Neutral Bay, Kirribilli Point and Port Jackson, where small ferries plied to Farm Cove. The painting shows a green shoreline, and the city with its tall buildings on the horizon. The artist fiddled with the image (probably working on it after he went back to Melbourne), painting over most of the trees that filled the lower edge and repainting the right side from top to bottom. Perhaps as a consequence when showing the painting in Sydney he cautiously named it 'The Harbour'.

Although according to Streeton's 1935 catalogue the date of The Harbour from Kurraba was 1927, Streeton was not in Sydney at all that year. He held exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney in March—April, during which time he stayed in Melbourne. Soon afterwards he bought a house in Grange Road, Toorak and, as he explained in a letter to Tom Roberts, had a 'good deal of rebuilding & renovation' to organise before moving there. In early November, immediately after the move, Streeton went to Trawool to paint in preparation for exhibitions early the following year. Overall, he produced comparatively few paintings in 1927.

Unfortunately the painting was 'restored' in 1966 and the canvas glued onto masonite, flattening the paint surface in the process.

This painting, dated 1928 by Streeton in his 1935 catalogue, is very similar to another, but larger, painting of blue hydrangeas — Hydrangea c. 1925 (Queensland Art Gallery) — which was first exhibited in 1926. The arrangement of flowers is alike in both paintings, although the asymmetrical balance is reversed. In each case, the jugs, of only slightly different shape and size, are earthenware with a lustrous glaze. Similarly, both backgrounds are murky-black and the tables on which the jugs stand both dark. But although the conception for each work was virtually the same the paintwork is different.

The flowers in this painting are very handsomely worked. Pale hydrangea petals have been brushed crisply over beautifully modulated tones of darker green and mauve. On the dark tabletop two fallen petals — two curving gestures from a paint-laden brush — are a virtuoso statement of art and representation. In this painting Streeton showed himself the confident artist who enjoyed his craft. By comparison his rendering of petals, highlights and textures in the larger Hydrangea c.1925 is quite circumspect.

Arthur Streeton loved gardens, creating them wherever he lived. In the 1920s he planned, planted and tended the largest garden of them all — at Olinda, in the Dandenongs. After buying a house with an established garden in Toorak in 1927 he later also bought the house next door, purely to extend his garden.

Very little is known about when and where this work was painted. The style indicates a late work. Earlier garden paintings, for instance those of Coombe Bank painted in 1913, are more impressionistic. In a London garden is undated and nothing identifies it in exhibition catalogues and reviews during the artist's lifetime except a painting from 1934, 'In a London garden', which is the only subject of the same large size as the work in the National Collection.

The Commonwealth Art Advisory Board bought In a London garden at auction in August 1962. The previous owners were Captain and Mrs Moffat-Pender who had acquired more than twenty-five paintings by Streeton during the 1920s and 1930s.

The garden's notable features are a huge flowering horse chestnut tree behind a substantial green hedge; a flowering lilac bush this side of the hedge; a pond (which appears to be small); and a low, brick, hexagonal-sided structure with tall grass springing from the inside.

The artist's daughter-in-law and Oliver, his grandson, were unable to identify the garden. They say it is not 'Longacres', Olinda and it is not one of the artist's two Toorak homes (which had adjoining gardens) at 17 Grange Road and around the corner in Douglas Street. (Streeton's Toorak paintings feature a mulberry tree.) The garden could possibly be an imaginative extension of the small high-walled back garden in St John's Wood Nora Clench's home to which Streeton moved after his marriage in January and from which he left in 1923 to live in Australia.

While he was living at St John's Wood, Streeton painted the garden there at least once in a work known to the family as The Dutch garden, so named for its neat, potted shrubs, its raked gravel and its brick, hexagonal-sided font. The hexagonal structure, with grass sprouting from it, appears in wartime photographs (1918, 1919) of the uniformed artist and his young son in the garden at St John's Wood.

The canvas has been painted twice. About two and a half centimetres from the edges of the present image is a ridge of paint. Nail holes are visible within the border. Exactly the same paint strokes are evident over the entire visible surface, within and outside this inner border. Furthermore, the paint surface within the border is considerably thicker than that outside it; and the upper layer of paint has cracked considerably. On the basis of these observations it could be inferred that the original painting was taken from its stretcher, placed onto a larger stretcher and an entirely new, rather larger, image painted over it.

All quoted material from Mary Eagle, Oil Paintings of Arthur Streeton in the National of Australia (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1994).

Compiled by Ron Ramsey, Manager Travelling Exhibitions, from the text written by Mary Eagle. Senior Curator. Australian Art.