Jeffrey Smart is known for his carefully drawn and constructed urban landscapes. He combines flat areas of colour against a carefully balanced geometry derived from the straight lines and antiseptic spaces of the contemporary city landscape and its arid hinterlands. Blousy, slightly faded...
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Art Reviews
By Anonymous
27 Aug 2019
In a celebrated passage in Romantic poet William Wordsworth’s (1770-1850) The Prelude, a boy ventures across a lake in a boat to find himself suddenly aware and intimidated by the rearing mountainous peak beyond the lake. There is a resonance with this, one of the classic encounters...
By Caroline Jones BA, MA (Art Admin.)
27 Aug 2019
Arthur Boyd consistently alternated between naturalistic and imaginative phases in his work. He would often return to the landscape genre after an exhaustive period of creative output. There is a sense of serenity present in Boyd’s depictions of the landscape, particularly after viewing his...
By Asta Cameron
27 Aug 2019
Lloyd Rees is one of Australia’s best regarded landscape artists. He won the Wynne Prize twice throughout his prodigious career, firstly in 1950 for The Harbour from McMahons Point and again in 1982 for Morning on the Derwent. His landscape painting prowess earned him many...
By Asta Cameron
27 Aug 2019
Moonlight Plain is a truly exemplary Storrier work in an attractive domestic scale, yet its composition is grand in both conception and execution. A glorious shooting star cuts across the sky from right to left and gives the work an abrupt energy, while cumulus cloud formations...
By Rodney James BA (Hons.), MA
27 Aug 2019
Mid-nineteenth century Australian art is regaled by the names of artists who came for the gold but ended up putting far more back into their adopted country than what they took out. Eugene von Guérard (1811-1901) and S. T. Gill (1818-1890) are two of the best-known artists to have ventured to...
By Anonymous
27 Aug 2019
This picture is less a portrait of his sister-in-law and hostess than about the ‘treasure’ which caught his eye and stirred his imagination during a recent visit to Spain. (Conder had an interest in Spain before this time. In Scaramouche, one of the sketched figures is a lady with a...
By Anonymous
27 Aug 2019
Conder captures a moment in time by the coast, perhaps Dieppe, with the subtle transition of colour from the distant sky and sea to the elaborate elegant costumes worn by the leisured Edwardian women. All faces are the same. Likenesses would detract from the moment, the freshness of...
By Anonymous
27 Aug 2019
This picture is an outstanding example of ‘aesthetic eclecticism’. Conder painted an imaginative collage which draws upon eternal themes. He created a theatrical setting in which the scurrilous Commedia dell’Arte character, Scaramouche, is clearly up to no good as he observes the...
By Rodney James BA (Hons.), MA
27 Aug 2019
James Clarke Waite’s Melbourne 1888 shows a section of the Yarra River from the south wharf looking east toward the city centre. Like Fred McCubbin’s (1855-1917) better known painting from that year Melbourne in 1888, a work subsequently cut in half, Waite’s picture focuses on the large vessels...
