Ferntree Gulley 1857

EUGENE VON GUERARD (1811-1901)

Ferntree Gulley 1857

oil on canvas on panel
19.0 x 24.0 cm
signed lower left: E.v. Guérard

Provenance:
The Collection of Rose and Nevin Hurst, Hobart
Private collection, Queensland
Menzies, Sydney, 25 March 2010, lot 40 (as Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges)
Private collection, Melbourne
Lawson-Menzies, Sydney, 19 May 2011, lot 41 (as Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges)
Private collection, Melbourne
Menzies, Sydney, 06 December 2012, lot 28
Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited:
The Victorian Society of Fine Arts, Melbourne, 1857, cat.148
Masterpiece Fine Art, Hobart (label attached verso)
Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne (label attached verso)
Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane (label attached verso)

Reference:
The Age, Melbourne, 22 May 1857, p.5
Bruce, C., Comstock, E., & McDonald, F., Eugene von Guerard: A German Romantic in the Antipodes, Alister Taylor Publishers, Martinborough, New Zealand, 1982, p.200 cat.36
Bonyhady, T., Australian Colonial Paintings in the Australian National Gallery, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1986, p.170
Ritchie, R., Seeing the Rainforests in 19th Century Australia, Rainforest Publishing, Sydney, 1989, p.67 (illus.)

Related Works:
Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges, 1857, oil on canvas, 92.0 x 130.0 cm, collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Ferntree or Dobson's Gulley, Dandenong Ranges, , 1858, pen and ink and wash on paper, 37.7 x 54.9 cm, collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Dobson's Gulley, Dandenong Ranges, 8-27 May 1859, pen and ink and wash on paper, 35.9 x 59.7 cm, Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Ferntree Gulley, Dandenong Ranges, colour lithograph, 32.8 x 51.5 cm, pl.XIII in Eugene von Guérard's Australian Landscapes: a Series of 24 Tinted Lithographs illustrative of the most striking and picturesque features of the Landscape Scenery of Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia and Tasmania, Drawn from Nature Lithographed by the Artist with Letter Press Descriptions of each View, Hamel & Ferguson, Melbourne [1866-67]

Estimate: $55000 - 75000

Result Hammer: $50000

Everything I saw incited me to pursue a strict truthfulness; not one line of a mountain range not one variation in the outline of a tree… could ever seem to me accidental or undeserving of precise representation.1

The sublime is a concept of great antiquity… but its reformation in the eighteenth century was to affect European and colonial art for a long time after. Eugene von Guérard was the archetypal exponent of this tradition within the chronology of Australian art history, and his influence on Australian landscape art during his lifetime was unsurpassed. Von Guérard lived and worked in Australia for thirty years in the late nineteenth century. In 1870 he was appointed the first Master of the School of Painting at the National Gallery of Victoria, where he was to influence the training of artists for the next eleven years. Amongst his pupils were Frederick McCubbin (1855-1917) and Tom Roberts (1856-1931). 

Von Guérard's personal artistic style was formed by the heritage of Claude Lorraine (1600-82), Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and Salvator Rosa (1615-73), and by the German Romantic landscape tradition which attempted to link man and God through nature. The central tenet of this German romantic tradition ‘recommended that artists study vegetation, climate, rock formation and the like in order to know Nature as a reality both concrete and spiritual and to experience it not as something inert, but as a living organism.’2 Von Guérard’s landscapes embody this ideal. They are not simply topographical and botanical studies; they are celebrations of the grandeur and beauty found in nature.

Within von Guérard’s impressive oeuvre of Australian paintings there are two works that have become secured within the annals of Australian art history: Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges, 1857 and North-East View From the Northern Top of Mount Kosciusko 1863, both now in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Australia. The former was exhibited in the inaugural exhibition of the Victorian Society of Fine Arts in 1857 to critical acclaim bordering on hysteria. The art critic of the Melbourne Argus heralded Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges as deserving ‘a place in one of the royal or national galleries of Europe’ and launched a campaign to buy it for Queen Victoria. The Melbourne Herald instead hoped it ‘will be kept amongst us [and] become the centre of our own “National Gallery”’.3

The painting on offer has much in common with the aforementioned work. It was included in the same exhibition under the title Ferntree Gulley [sic] and is thematically and compositionally very similar. Both works depict the same view identifiable by the arching eucalypt in the upper left of the composition and the groupings of tree ferns in the middle and right areas of the foreground. In both works the eye is drawn into the landscape via the earthy tones of the clearing depicted in the foreground. The most distinguishing difference between the two is the presence of the lyrebird in the foreground of the related work. Also of note is the difference in technique.  The work on offer is more expressive in tone and technique. The colours and brushwork are more stylised, while the related work records the details of the scene with a sense of photographic realism.

Of von Guérard’s work, a writer for the Illustrated Melbourne Post of November 1863 remarked that von Guérard’s paintings unite a ‘poet’s feeling with an artist’s power’, and praised his ‘fidelity to truth, retentive memory, and reverence for his art, which enable him to transfer to his canvas, with such singular felicity and unerring precision, the objects he observes.’4

Footnotes:

1. Eugene von Guérard cited in Hutchings, P., ‘Eugene von Guérard: Nature Revealed’, Art Monthly Australia, Issue 246, Summer, 2011, p.76

2.  Daniel Thomas cited in Bruce, C., Eugene von Guérard, Australian Gallery Directors Council, Canberra, 1980, p.11

3. Cited in Daniel Thomas’ catalogue entry for the National Gallery of Australia, http://cs.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=36997

4. Bruce, C., Eugene von Guérard, Australian Gallery Directors Council, Canberra, 1980, p.3

Alison Burns BA (Hons); MA