40. ARTHUR STREETON

Arthur Streeton painted this accomplished oil on canvas work at the height of his powers at the age fifty-seven, thirteen years before he was knighted for services to art. As such, it is typical of the skill and painterly qualities that brought him many justly earned acknowledgements. Most scholars and historians now agree that had Streeton lived in Paris at the time, his work would mark him out as the equal of douard Manet (1832-1883) and, perhaps, even the great French artist Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). Whatever the case, it is certain that Streetons paintings belonged on the same level as his artistic contemporaries in England.

Sir Arthur Streeton fervently believed that the home-grown and unique attributes of the Australian landscape could move artists and poets just as European landscapes moved English and Continental artists. Streeton acted on this locally based belief and used a sympathetic vision to sharpen his aesthetic grasp of the beauty of the Australian landscape, particularly when seen at lyrical and wistful moments. The point is clear: Streetons poetically inflected vision is what charges his remarkable paintings with their charming local accents and visual aptness. Of course, he did all this with wonderful paint handling and skill and the best of his paintings, like the current work, are characterised by a light-handed deftness that is a substantial advance upon the overwrought topographical effects strained after by artists of an earlier colonial generation. Little wonder that Streeton was universally considered the most famous and accomplished landscape painter of his generation.

Oliver Streeton, the artists grandson, previously confirmed that the two early titles of this painting are both wrong and further detailed research led to establishing its current title. The present painting was titled A Mornings Impression, South Yarra in 1937 and Melbourne from One Tree Hill in 1992 and is now more definitively called Richmond from Fairlie House. Furthermore, Streetons grandson cogently affirmed that the paintings view towards the Melbourne suburb of Richmond faces East-North-East and that the paintings light source radiates from the West rather than the Eastall this makes the painting more of an afternoon impression and militates against the work being thought of as a morning impression.1

Streetons domestic-sized oil painting Richmond from Fairlie House of c1924-1925 presents a semi-countrified scene that overlooks the encroachment of the industrial factories that once peppered the fertile banks of the winding Yarra River: tanning works, grain merchants, foundries, clay works and mercantile firms replaced river gums, flood plains and native scrub lands. A tonally restrained painting, Richmond from Fairlie House may profitably be seen as contrasted with the verdant colours and openness of his outback panoramas and the wide vistas and majesty of his mountain landscapes. In the present painting there is neither the proud nationalism of his large rural themes, nor the majestic stance of large native eucalypt trees in the forests of Melbournes Mount Dandenong region. The present painting is muted and the hazy curtain of industrial pollution sullies its expanse of sky. These types of environmentally inflected sentiments, once well appreciated in Streetons time, were resurrected in our time by the published research of Dr. Tim Bonyhady of the School of Law at the Australian National University in Canberra.2 Such was Streetons love of the local environment that his life-long environmentalist concerns placed him at the early forefront of objectors who had serious misgivings about the compromising effects of rampant industrialism. Considered in these ways, Streetons painting Richmond from Fairlie House c1924-1925 may be accurately read as a subtle artistic contradistinction between natural beauty and man-made intrusions upon that beauty.

Richmond from Fairlie House shows the artist displaying his refined bravura and confident paint handling. The paintings background, middle ground and foreground are full of deft touches and suffused colour harmonies. The painting is not a mere realistic documentation of a scene or an event but presents an aesthetic and pictorial metaphor of environmental change: something that may be seen in many of his finest paintings. Its sentiment is neither maudlin nor fulminating, and its imagistic power is amplified by an absence of preachy judgements. The branches and leaves of the foreground tree on the right of the canvas are painted in a free, scumbled way that recalls Streetons early use of the technique in well-known paintings such as Above us the Great Grave Sky of 1890, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

After his wife Esther died in 1938, Streeton permanently retired to Olinda and spent much time pottering about the garden. He died at Olinda on Wednesday 1 September 1943. Like many turn-of-the-century Romantics, he converted to Catholicism before his death at the age of seventy-six. He is buried in the Ferntree Gully Cemetery.

The painting Richmond from Fairlie House shows Streeton, the lover of the poetry of John Keats (1795-1821) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), at his lyrical and wistful best. It was a very happy time for Streeton, he was living both in Toorak and at a new house in Olinda, he was financially secure, nationally famous and he wandered about the bush and the tall forests of Mount Dandenong taking in the deep vistas and open horizons. These were the types of activities that the self-taught artist always loved and used in his aesthetic ruminations. The essence of these sorts of activities is distilled in the moving affect, charm, gentleness and intuitive affinity of Streetons very fine painting, Richmond from Fairlie House.

(We appreciate the assistance of the late Oliver Streeton with this catalogue entry)

 

Footnotes:

1. Communication with Menzies Art Brands, 27 January 2010
2. His most well-known study is: Images in Opposition: Australian Landscape Painting 1801-1890, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985

Reference:
Anon., The Art of Arthur Streeton: Landscapes and Flowers, The Age, Melbourne, 4 April 1929
Arthur Streeton Number, Art in Australia, Third Series, no.40, Sydney, 1931
Eagle, M., The Oil Paintings of Arthur Streeton in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra,
National Gallery of Australia, 1994
Galbally, A., Arthur Streeton, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1972
Galbally, A., Streeton, Sir Arthur Ernest (1867-1943), Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1990, vol.12, pp.119-121
Galbally, A., & Gray, A., Letters from Smike: The Letters of Arthur Streeton, 1890-1943, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1989
Smith, G., Arthur Streeton, the Man and his Art 1867-1943, Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, 1995

 

Associate Professor Ken Wach
Dip. Art; T.T.T.C.; Fellowship RMIT; MA; PhD.
Former Principal Research Fellow and Head of the School of Creative Arts
The University of Melbourne