After autumn rains

Jane Sutherland was a pioneering artist of the late 19th century. She was one of the few female members of the so-called Heidelberg group and with colleagues including Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Walter Withers took part in the now famous plein air expeditions that established a school of impressionist-inspired painting in Australia.

Sutherland shared with her male colleagues a passion for painting the local environment; for detailing the distinct colours, ambience and feel of being immersed in the bush, but had to work hard to achieve this vision. Unlike her male counterparts who camped in the bush on weekends, Sutherland was bound by social convention to limit her expeditions to day trips, travel between city and surrounds with her painter’s baggage during daylight hours and move through the bushlands with her restrictive clothing. This sense of struggle does not translate in the ambient tranquillity of her paintings.

'After autumn rains' is an exceptional painting in Sutherland’s relatively small oeuvre. The pastel-hued colour scheme, dotted with vivid pinks and blues, beautifully evokes a misty landscape after rain. The brushy paintwork in the foreground and in the trees on the horizon line to the left is further suggestive of the softness of the land after an autumn shower. Such poeticising painting techniques are signatures of Sutherland’s style. In 1888 'The Argus' noted this ‘clever vagueness’ in her work and the ‘general indistinctiveness of all the objects in the landscape’, hallmarks of the impressionist painting style.