Jeffrey Smart’s Bus by the Tiber of 1977-78 is not a mere picture of something that was seen, but of something that was created into being. That is, it was thought into existence. Consider, for a moment, the cravated Smart on the balcony of his sprawling Tuscan villa stretching back in...
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Art Reviews
By Marguerite Brown MA - Art Curatorship
03 Mar 2021
Robert Dickerson forged a successful career despite very humble beginnings, earning a reputation as the rough diamond of the Australian art world. Growing-up in Depression-era Sydney, Dickerson left school at the age of fourteen to work full-time in a factory and never received a formal art...
By Caroline Jones MA (Art Admin.)
03 Mar 2021
When Queen Elizabeth II visited Australia in February 1954, she was the first reigning monarch to set foot on Australian soil. Following the death of her father in 1952, the newly crowned Queen had taken over duties originally planned for King George VI. It is estimated that the monarch...
By Rodney James, B.A. (Hons.), M.A
03 Mar 2021
Arthur Boyd sits in the highest echelon of Australian landscape painters. For over five decades, Boyd investigated the complexity and variety of the Australian bush, capturing its peculiarities and topographical features and imbuing it with his own idiosyncratic motifs and personal symbols....
By Ashleigh Wilson
03 Mar 2021
Brett Whiteley wasn’t supposed to be back so soon. He had left home in 1960, destined for Europe, hungry for art, culture, experience. In Paris, from ‘Modigliani’s country’, he said he wanted to sit alone to see how ‘environment can mould, shape or even stain the personality of a genius.’1...
By Catherine Baxendale B Phil Hons
03 Mar 2021
In January 1963, John and Mary Perceval sold their family home in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs and moved to London.
By Caroline Jones BA, MA (Art Admin.)
03 Mar 2021
Arthur Streeton began painting flowers while living in London, shortly after his marriage to Nora Clench in 1908. The artist and his wife settled into their new life and home, establishing a decorative English garden which would provide inspiration for his study of floral subjects. Streeton had...
By Rodney James, B.A. (Hons.), M.A
03 Mar 2021
Rural labour with a nationalist ethos has been a dominant theme in Australian art and literature from the mid-nineteenth century on. The art of Frederick McCubbin was at the forefront of these investigations; his fascination with epic narrative paintings of white settlement in Australia produced...
By Catherine Baxendale B Phil Hons
03 Mar 2021
Writing to fellow artist Walter Withers (1854-1914) in May 1909, Arthur Streeton reported, ‘I’m off with [Tom] Roberts on a cycling trip through Dorset to look for subjects for the Summer.’1 This excursion through Roberts’ native county would follow in the footsteps of JMW Turner (...
