44. ARTHUR STREETON

Sir Arthur Streetons South Head, Sydney (also known as Sydney Heads)1912-13 with its breezily deft brushwork and letterbox slot view, shows the hallmark attributes that made the artist so justly famous.

Furthermore, the paintings provenance is impeccable, its frame is original and its theme is characteristic of Streeton at his best its all there: the visually intoxicating lapis-lazuli waters, those wide-angle vistas, that heady naturalness. Few artists can match the soft glow and warmth of Streetons optical embrace of the seductive aspects of the Australian landscape.

Most scholars and historians now agree that had the Mount Duneed-born Streeton lived in Paris, his artworks 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 and France. Even in his time there were many who agreed. For instance, he was awarded a Bronze Medal from the Socit des Artistes Franais and was accepted as a full member of Royal Society of British Artists in London. He also gained an Honourable Mention at the Paris Salon in 1892.

Streeton always believed that the unique attributes of the Australian landscape could move artists and poets just as European landscapes moved English and Continental artists. One did not have to sing the songs of others. 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 home-grown vision is what charged his remarkable paintings with their charming local accents and visual aptness.

Of course, Streeton 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 and spirited technique that was a substantial advance upon the painstakingly over-worked 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.

It is worth recalling that the light and airy visual attributes of Streetons South Head, Sydney (also known as Sydney Heads)1912-13  owes its painterly attributes to the aesthetic aims introduced in the famously daring and original 9 x 5 Impressions Exhibition which opened on 17 August 1889 at Buxtons Rooms on Melbournes Swanston Street (directly across from the Town Hall). Streeton showed as many as forty paintings in this ground-breaking exhibition. The aims of the radical exhibition outlined an artistic response that called for a type of visual economy that stressed rapid one-time transfer of visual data onto canvas or, in this case, cedar cigar box lids. In the minds of Streeton, Frederick McCubbin (1855-1917), Charles Conder (1868-1909) and Tom Roberts (1856-1931), painting now called for a new immediacy that acted as an optical register of atmospheric effects and relied upon a new painterly dexterity. The 9 x 5 Impressions Exhibition catalogue put it succinctly:

An effect is only momentary: so an Impressionist tries to find his place. Two half hours are never alike, and he who paints a sunset on two successive evenings must be more or less painting from memory. So, in these works, it has been the object of the artist to render faithfully, and thus obtain first records of effects widely differing, and often of very fleeting character.1

However, over the next twenty or so years Streetons artistic techniques and aesthetic aims responded to wider aims especially after his first two trips to London in 1896 and 1908. Streetons modifications of approach from 1908 onwards (the period of the present painting) seem to owe something to seeing the paintings of the American John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) in London. Sargent was one of the most technically brilliant and pre-eminent artists of the time; his work embraced the use of convex layers of sumptuous surface and a corresponding use of highlighting colour his works are optically luscious. These attributes originally arose from the theories of the French artist Charles Carolus-Duran (1837-1917) who in turn learnt much from his own close study of the remarkable techniques of the great Spanish artist Diego Velzquez (1599-1660).

The artistic examples offered up by these artists were not lost to Streeton. In essence the change may be simply characterised as moving from the earlier open-air recording of particular effects to the later studio-based capturing of general atmospheres. The change is subtle but discernible. This stylistic development may be seen in his Mosman Bay and Point Piper, each of 1907, both which are held in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.

The slightly larger present painting, Streetons South Head, Sydney (also known as Sydney Heads)1912-13, besides almost sharing its exact dimensions with Mosman Bay of 1907 and Point Piper, has much in common with these two subtle masterworks in the NGV collection. Certainly, the three paintings embrace a girt by sea theme (who in Australia can deny its deep subconscious appeal?); as well, the three works reveal the rise of a new turn-of-the-century hazy softness in Streeton. In summary, Streetons subsequent post-London works have a mellowness that finds its aesthetic sources and painterly characteristics in the restrained compositions of James McNeil Whistler (1834-1903), the wet on wet techniques of Sargent and the as seen through a gauze informal Japonism of Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904).

What arose in the mature Streeton was, as noted, a poetically inflected vision that seems to encompass more than merely what the eye can see. The works are evocative that is, they call-up and prompt sensation. Accordingly, the viewer is drawn to paintings such as his South Head, Sydney (also known as Sydney Heads)1912-13 not because of its fluidly assured technique, but for what the technique reveals about the subject. This is the palpable core of the mastery of Streetons South Head, Sydney.

All these observations serve to unfold the deep appeal and underlying artistic sophistication of Streetons highly accomplished South Head, Sydney (also known as Sydney Heads)1912-13. What this adroitly executed painting presents is a highly focussed wide-angle panoramic vista of one of Sydneys most iconic landmarks. The viewers eye is led inwardly to this centrally placed headland by an expanse of sea painted in dappled tones of blue, grey and green that set off the umber yellows of coastal cliff lands in ways that seem to catch the raking light of the sun. An unhurried charm pervades the painting. Its one of Streetons gems a love of the land conveyed through the love of the paint.

Looked at in total, Streetons South Head, Sydney (also known as Sydney Heads)1912-13 with its optically amalgamated pictorial effects channels the mind into an identification with the distractingly heady charms of a bygone Sydney in ways that exemplify the artists newly developed locational aptness and painterly competence.

After his wife Nora died in 1938, Streeton permanently retired to Longacres (built in 1924) on Range Road in Olinda and spent much of his time pottering about the garden. He died there on Wednesday 1 September 1943.2 Like many turn-of-the-century Romantics, he converted to Catholicism before his death at the age of seventy-six. He was buried in the Ferntree Gully Cemetery.

Footnotes

1. Gleeson, J., Impressionist Painters 1881-1930, Landsdowne, Melbourne, 1971, p.104.

2. Sir Arthur Streeton - Obituary: The Argus, 2 September 1943, p.3.

Literature

Anon., The Art of Arthur Streeton: Landscapes and Flowers, The Age, Melbourne, 4 April 1929

Anon., Sir Arthur Streeton - Obituary: The Argus, 2 September 1943, p.3

Arthur Streeton Number, Art in Australia, Third Series, Number 40, Sydney, Art in Australia, 1931.

Eagle, M., The Oil Paintings of Arthur Streeton in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994

Galbally, A., Arthur Streeton, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1972

Galbally, A., Streeton, Sir Arthur Ernest (1867-1943), Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol.12, 1990, pp.119-121

Gleeson, J., Impressionist Painters 1881-1930, Landsdowne, Melbourne, 1971

Galbally, A., Gray, A., Letters from Smike: The Letters of Arthur Streeton, 1890-1943, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1989.

Lindsay, L., Arthur Streetons Place in Australian Art, Art in Australia, Ure Smith, Sydney, No.2, 1917.

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, School of Creative Arts
The University of Melbourne