Streeton

Streeton’s pre-eminent place in Australian landscape painting was secured in the first decades of the 20th century. During and after the First World War, discussions of Australian impressionism evolved from representing a national school of art to embodying an ideal of nationhood itself. In 1919 critic and artist Lionel Lindsay wrote of ‘The purple noon’s transparent might’: ‘It is a great portrait of our birth place, and blazons high the claim of Arthur Streeton to the status of a great national painter’.

Streeton brought his Somme battlefield scenes to Australia in 1920 and exhibited them alongside Australian paintings from the previous decades, sensing our evolving identity was closely linked to the fighting in Europe. With the death of 60000 Australian soldiers and with another 15000 Australians dying during the Spanish flu pandemic in 1919, it is little wonder audiences also responded to the familiar pastoral scenes of Streeton’s new Australian works, painted in a style they now trusted. Streeton’s 1920s landscapes were widely celebrated and occasionally criticised for being conservative or glibly painted. While they are not modernist, they participated in the making of a modern Australia shaped by both progressive and traditional cultural values.

Streeton had a passion for gardening and throughout his life he delighted in propagating and caring for plants – from growing lemonscented gum trees and auratum lilies at St John’s Wood in London to tending five acres of native and introduced species at Longacres, his Olinda property. Arrangements of flowers and fruit, often from his own garden, meant he could paint directly from nature without needing to travel to his subjects or work outdoors. In these still-lifes Streeton continued his keen observation of nature while exploring in his studio formal questions of colour, light and shade.

In 1934 Streeton shared his thoughts on gardening in The Argus:

Gardening is the very devil. It should be studiously avoided by those who delight in an easy seat and a cigar … Doing one’s own gardening, like painting pictures, has its own reward – the secret pleasure of doing it.

In the 1920s and 1930s Streeton painted over 150 flower paintings. These domestic subjects, although overshadowed by his grand pastoral landscapes, dominated his later exhibitions and received praise from critics.

Streeton believed that artists should participate in public life and that their opinions mattered. He did not hesitate to express his own ideas on a wide variety of topics and was often published in the major newspapers of the day. Acceptance by the establishment mattered to him later in life, and his roles as an artist and cultural commentator lead to a knighthood from King George VI in 1937. He was proud of what he had achieved, but he also used his public platform to campaign on issues he felt were significant.

Streeton’s life-long love of nature led to his speaking out against the destruction of Australia’s old-growth forests from the mid 1920s. He was equally concerned about urban planning, and in 1925 campaigned to prevent a tramline being built through Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens. He titled a drawing of the gardens Beware of the axe. From the late 1920s Streeton exhibited many paintings which sought to bring attention to the logging of old-growth forests and predicted a desolate future for Australia if deforestation continued. It is remarkable that almost a century on we are still having the same debates.