South Head, Port Jackson

'South Head, Port Jackson' offers the experience of the harbour from the water, as so many boating or ferry-travelling Sydney-siders know it. It is a watercolour of great vigour and verisimilitude; a poetic gem in blue and yellow, very like Streeton’s much admired small Sydney Harbour oil panels of the 1890s such as 'Musgrave Street Wharf' 1893 (Scheumack collection).

Streeton has not only captured the rhythmical roll of the harbour waters near the mouth of the harbour, but also the changing effects of passing weather – sunlight on the dry grassy slope of the headland, about to be extinguished by rain clouds - and the very particular shape of South Head just before the harbour waters meet the open sea. A breaking wave and the steamer in the middle distance contribute to the immediacy of the work. Featured are the historic Macquarie Lighthouse (Australia’s first) and the Hornby Light.

Streeton painted this watercolour in England, basing it on a sketchy panoramic watercolour he made of the subject in 1896, prior to leaving for England from Sydney on the French ship SS Polynesia on 27 January 1897, together with whatever impressions he gained on board as it passed South Head.