European migrants arriving in Australia before World War Two found that the easiest way to make a good life was to blend in as best they could. Many changed their names, simplifying and Anglicising their ‘difficult’ spellings and pronunciations, modifying their dress and behaviour to be accepted...
Slide Show
Art Reviews
The Shoalhaven River was a continual source of inspiration to Arthur Boyd and, looking back over the artist’s vast body of work, formed a major part of Boyd’s oeuvre. The Shoalhaven region on the south coast of New South Wales, has historically been an area favoured by artists because of its...
A painter of sporadic genius, John Perceval’s life swung from the occasional low point, mainly characterised by inactivity, to the greatest heights. His work invites comparison with that of his friend and brother-in-law Arthur Boyd. Both artists started their careers in the late 1930s and after...
Garry Shead is one of Australia’s most renowned artists for his poetic depictions of Australian culture and the essence of human love. Arguably his most powerful series, Dance Sequence, is one of the artist’s most adored series and includes the present work, Dancers (Sloping) 2000. The...
Regular travellers on the Hume Highway, heading north from Melbourne towards Sydney will be familiar with the town of Avenel, about one and a half hours into the trip. The landscape there is heavily treed and yet to the right, you are aware of Strathbogie Ranges as they rise steeply, not that...
Eugene von Guérard, born in 1811, began his life in courtly Vienna1 where his father Bernhard, a painter of miniatures, enjoyed the patronage of the Royal family. With changes in taste over time, however, von Guérard senior was obliged to seek patronage elsewhere, and so in 1830...
Ti –Tree and She Oaks belongs to a key group of landscape paintings produced by John Perceval during a highly productive period working in and around Melbourne in the late 1950s.
Perceval’s career as a painter began during a period convalescing from polio in the 1930s, and...
Although Frederick McCubbin is best known for his affiliation with the Heidelberg school, his finest works arguably resulted from a subsequent period of relative isolation. During the final decade of McCubbin’s life, from 1907 to 1917, the artist mainly worked alone and in the open air,...
Arthur Boyd had been living in London for seven years when he painted the present work, and his position as a leading Australian artist on the international stage was well established. Following the success of his seminal Brides series in 1958/59, he left for London and continued the...
Although Garry Shead could be broadly described as a republican and his Royal Suite paintings promptly entered the Australian republican debate of the late 1990s, this was not the primary intention of the series. It had been a long time in the making, in fact about forty years...