Arthur Streeton
Biography of Australian Impressionist Landscape
Painter.
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Arthur Streeton
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Arthur Streeton (1867-1943)Contents • Biography |
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One of Australia's best landscape artists of the late 19th century and the most successful painter of the Heidelberg School (c.1886-1900) of Australian Impressionism, Arthur Streeton is celebrated for his evocative and iconic landscape painting, which perfectly captures the unique light and colour of the Australian countryside and outback. Although he attended classes at the National Gallery School in Melbourne under Irish-born master George Frederick Folingsby (1828–91), he remained largely self-taught, especially in oil painting. Influenced by Turner as well as the Barbizon School of landscape painting, Streeton was also strongly drawn to the loose brushwork and light-focused approach of French Impressionism, as well as its focus on plein air painting directly from nature. As a founder member of the Heidelberg School and a close friend of its leader Tom Roberts (1856-1931), Streeton painted with the group in its artist camps at Box Hill, Heidelberg and the Yarra, around Melbourne; and also at Richmond and the Hawkesbury River, Coogee Bay and Little Sirius Cove, outside Sydney. Three of his greatest masterpieces of Impressionist landscape painting include: Still Glides the Stream (1890, Art Gallery of New South Wales), Spring (1890, National Gallery of Victoria), Fire's on Lapstone Tunnel (1891, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney), The Railway Station, Redfern (1893, Art Gallery of NSW), and The Purple Noon's Transparent Might (1896, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne). In addition to these famous landscape paintings, he also produced a number of portraits and self-portraits. Like Roberts, Streeton spent most of the years 1900-1924 in England, becoming an Official War Artist in 1918. His comparative lack of success abroad made no difference to his reputation in his native country, where he was seen as an icon of modern art and the foremost painter of the remote Australian landscape. |
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Arthur Ernest Streeton was born at Mount Duneed, near Geelong, Victoria, the fourth of five children of the English-born schoolteacher Charles Henry Streeton and his wife Mary. In 1874, the family moved to Melbourne, settling at Richmond where Arthur was educated at the Punt Road State School until 1880, after which when he became a clerk with Rolfe & Co of Bourke Street. Having been interested in sketching since childhood, Streeton took night classes at the National Gallery of Victoria School of Design in 1882-87, where in 1886 his talent for drawing led to his joining the lithographers Charles Troedel & Co of Collins Street. As far as painting was concerned, however, he remained largely self-taught, depending almost entirely on manuals like Talks About Art (1877) by William Morris Hunt, which recommended the techniques of Barbizon artists like Jean-Francois Millet (1814-75) and Camille Corot (1796-1875). In 1885 he had his first exhibition at the Victorian Academy of Art. |
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In the summer of 1886 Streeton met Tom Roberts who had returned to Melbourne the previous year from 3 years of study at the London Royal Academy. Roberts invited him to join his plein-air painting group which painted landscapes in the countryside around Melbourne, and at its seaside suburbs like Mentone. Joining the group, Streeton worked hard to master the problems of light, heat, colour and perspective which fascinated him. He was already developing his high-keyed gold and blue palette, which he considered the basic scheme of colour in outdoor Australia: see, for instance, his classic Aussie landscape painting Near Heidelberg (1890, National Gallery of Victoria). Following his success, in selling two pictures - Settler's Camp and Pastoral - at the Victorian Artists' Society Exhibition in 1888, Streeton was free for the moment to paint full time with his new colleagues, who now included the modern artists Walter Withers (1854-1914), Fred McCubbin (1855-1917) and Charles Conder (1868-1909), as well as Clara Southern, Jane Sutherland, John Llewelyn Jones and John Mather. A camp set up at an old homestead at Eaglemont, overlooking the Yarra valley, near Heidelberg, some 7 miles north east of Melbourne, became the centre of their activities. Streeton, Conder and Roberts became especially close - indeed, the trio's two year presence at Eaglemont led directly to the group being christened The Heidelberg School. The Heidelberg School was not simply a replication of French Impressionism. The influence of naturalism as well as realism was also evident in much of its work. In practice, this meant that colour pigments used were more natural-looking in tone, and that compositions as a whole retained a greater sense of form than Impressionist paintings created by (say) Monet (1840-1926), Renoir (1841-1919) or Pissarro (1830-1903). For a better understanding of this, please see: Characteristics of Impressionist Painting 1870-1910. The 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition In August 1889, the Heidelberg painters held their first and only exhibition at Buxton's Art Gallery, Melbourne. Of the 183 pictures on display, Streeton contributed 40. The exhibition - named after the size of cigar-box lids used as wooden 'canvases' for most of the pictures - was something of a rebellion against the prevailing old-fashioned traditions of Victorian art in Australia. The style of the paintings was clearly Impressionist, not least in its depiction of momentary effects, and the whole decor of the show was designed to express a sense of bohemian aestheticism. Although it won a degree of popular success, the show - not unlike the original Impressionist Exhibitions in Paris - attracted severe criticism from some reviewers, and little support from arts institutions. This was partly because the defining element of the Heidelberg painters was their open-air painting, similar to that being practised in Europe and North America. The point was that, while many artists made oil sketches of outdoor scenery, most did not treat them as finished works, but merely preliminary studies to be completed later in studio. In contrast, Roberts, Conder and Streeton - like their Parisian counterparts - treated these rapid outdoor oil sketches as finished paintings. The Eaglemont camp broke up in January 1890. three months later Conder left Australia for Europe, never to return. In June, Arthur Streeton - still only 23 years old, and growing in confidence having just sold Still Glides the Stream, and Shall For Ever Glide (1890) to the Art Gallery of New South Wales - moved to Sydney, selecting Coogee Bay as his first location for plein-air painting. See, for instance, Sunlight Sweet, Coogee (1890, Art Gallery of New South Wales), and From McMahon's Point - Fare One Penny (1890, National Gallery of Australia). In 1891, he spent several months painting in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales. There, he made a number of drawings as well as his largest oil painting to date, Fire's On, Lapstone Tunnel (1891, Art Gallery of New South Wales). Inspired by the new tunnel that was being blasted through the sandstone rock at Lapstone, the painting was named after the warning cry that preceded each controlled explosion. The painting portrays the aftermath of a true-life accident which occurred in full view of Streeton as a result of a premature blast, and shows the body being removed from the scene. However, the drama of the tragic accident is overshadowed by the overpowering effect of the wide blue sky and the sun-bleached landscape. The fact that the huge scale of the landscape dwarfs the diminutive human figures only adds to the heroic nature of the tunnelling work being done. Like Roberts' Shearing the Rams (1890, National Gallery of Victoria), and McCubbin's Down on His Luck (1889, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth), Fire's On, Lapstone Tunnel symbolised the indomitable nature and heroic progress of the new nation. In 1892, Streeton joined Roberts at Curlew Camp at Little Sirius Cove, a small inlet to the west of Mosman on Sydney Harbour. Here, he painted a range of harbour views, beach scenes, Art-Nouveau-style nudes and his masterpiece, The Railway station, Redfern (1893). He also joined Roberts in opening a teaching studio in Pitt Street, Sydney. The Purple Noon's Transparent Might Another painting venue was the area around Richmond, a small town at the foot of the Blue Mountains, close to the Hawkesbury River, where Roberts and Conder had come to paint in 1888. In 1896, Streeton himself visited the area and painted a series of Hawkesbury River pictures which were renowned for their rendering of light, space and heat. Ranked among his most famous works, they include The Purple Noon's Transparent Might (1896) (the title comes from a poem by Percy Shelley), which was shown at Streeton's first one-man show in Melbourne in December 1896, and snapped up by the National Gallery of Victoria. Much of the picture was painted in a 2-hour stretch, one boiling hot January day, in temperatures which reached 45 degrees Centigrade. In 1897, Streeton left Australia for Europe, stopping off at Port Said and Cairo for five months painting in the unique light of North Africa before continuing to London. His initial experience in England was similar to that of Roberts a few years later. He felt little affinity for English landscape, colours or light, and quickly became homesick. Even worse, little attention was paid to his work: he exhibited at the London Royal Academy, the New English Art Club and the Camden Town Group, with little success. But in 1906-7 he returned for a year to Australia, where he enjoyed great acclaim for his latest canvases. In late 1907 he sailed again for London, and in January the following year married the Canadian violinist, Esther Leonora Clench. Between 1908 and 1923, apart from brief visits to Australia in Spring 1914 and 1919, plus short trips to Venice, France and Canada, Streeton lived in London, although he also showed his work back home. For example, after spending a month painting in Venice, in September 1908, the completed paintings were shipped to Melbourne in 1909, where they were exhibited as "Arthur Streeton's Venice".) Partly due to the increased exposure stemming from his wife's extensive social contacts, his painting began to attract attention in England and France, and also in America. Appointed an Official War Artist in 1918, he spent two tours of duty in France painting the Western Front for the Australian government. In 1923, Streeton and his family finally returned to Australia, settling at Olinda in the Dandenong Ranges. In 1928, at the age of 60, he won the Wynne prize for landscape for his composition Afternoon Light: the Goulburn Valley (1928). Although he continued painting for several years, and attracted high prices for his pictures, he never rediscovered the inspiration of his early work from the 1880s and 1890s. He became the art critic for the Argus (1929-35), in which guise he demonstrated a complete lack of sympathy with avant-garde art. At the same time he embellished and burnished the 'Streeton story', as part of his interpretation of the history of Australian painting. In 1937 he was given a knighthood for his services to fine art. He died in September 1943 after a long illness. Paintings by Arthur Streeton can be seen in many of the best art museums in Australia, including the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra; the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne; the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) in Adelaide; the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) in Sydney; the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) in Brisbane; and the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) in Perth. His works now sell for record sums. Golden Summer, Eaglemont (1889) was sold for around 1000 guineas in 1924, but in the 1980s it was bought in a private sale by the National Gallery of Australia for US$3.5 million. In May 2005, his painting, Sunlight Sweet, Coogee (1890), was sold for A$2.04 million at Sotheby's, becoming only the second work by an Australian painter to exceed the A$2 million mark in a public auction.
Further Information For more details about the development of French Impressionism, see: - Impressionism:
Origins, Influences. |
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artists, see: Famous Painters.
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