Streeton

The 1880s was an exciting time in Australian art, characterised by camaraderie and optimism as younger artists confronted a barely established cultural status quo. Plein-air painting – painting outdoors in front of the subject – was embraced and a new style developed that was aligned with art practices in Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States. A desire for change converged with cosmopolitan influences that led away from the carefully detailed studio painting of more conservative artists.

The younger painters adopted a freer style based on direct observation, experimenting with heightened colour and evident brushstrokes, and focused on the life and landscapes around them. Distinctively local and demonstrably international, it became known as Australian impressionism. Arthur Streeton turned 13 in 1880. He began his art education early in the decade and by its end he was one of the leaders of the new painting movement that delivered its manifesto in The 9 by 5 impression exhibition in August 1889.

Mr Arthur Streeton is busily engaged in preparing his contribution of ‘impressions’ for the forthcoming exhibition at Buxton’s Art Gallery, and all his spare time is devoted to watching for likely subjects, and reproducing them in colour as soon as found.

Sophie Osmond, Table Talk, 26 July 1889

The now legendary 9 by 5 impression exhibition was carefully staged by the key instigators Streeton, Tom Roberts and Charles Conder in August 1889. The ‘9 by 5’ in the title refers to the dimensions of the cigar box lids that some works were painted on, which determined the scale of most exhibits. The artists had the broad timber frames made, which gave a unified modern appearance to their display in a gallery decorated with Japanese screens and draped with ‘Liberty silks’ in the taste of the British Aesthetic movement, which emphasised visual beauty above all else.

Critic James Smith, cautiously admiring of these artists’ previous plein-air paintings, rose to the provocation of quickly painted sketches exhibited as complete artworks. Decrying their lack of ‘finish’, he likened their ‘slap-dash brush work’ to ‘primeval chaos’. The 9 by 5 paintings were closer to the tonal panels exhibited by James Abbott McNeill Whistler in London in 1884, where Roberts is thought to have seen them, than the vivid colour and broken brushwork of the French impressionists.

Oh the long hot day, Oh the gift of appreciation. I sit on our hill of gold, on the north side, the wind seems sunburnt & fiery as it runs through my beard.

Streeton to Tom Roberts, early 1891

Streeton took ‘artistic possession’ of the old Mount Eagle homestead at Eaglemont near Heidelberg in the summer of 1888. Located on the land of the Wurundjeri people, with elevated views overlooking the Yarra River (Birrarung, or ‘river of mists’), it was some 13 kilometres from Melbourne. Now 21 and able to paint full-time after recent sales, Streeton camped out in the large empty house and was joined by Charles Conder, occasionally by Tom Roberts, and on the weekends by many other artist friends who came to paint, picnic and party into the night.

Sydney Dickinson coined the term ‘Heidelberg School’ in 1891, writing of the artists that ‘their work has been done chiefly in this attractive suburb, where, with others of like inclination, they have established a summer congregation for out-of-door painting’. Streeton thrived in the close company of other artists. His bold brushwork and by now skilled use of colour captured light and atmosphere with energy and sensitivity in a group of paintings that remain among the great achievements of Australian impressionism.

Streeton first visited Sydney in June 1890 after the sale of ‘_Still glides the stream, and shall for ever glide_’ to the Art Gallery of New South Wales earlier in the year. He became entranced with the harbour and beaches and particularly with the changing effect of light on water during the course of a day and in differing weather conditions. Streeton supercharged the colours he had used previously for bush subjects near Melbourne, creating saturated tones including the rich ultramarine that became known as ‘Streeton blue’.

On his second visit in 1891, Streeton enthused in a letter to a Melbourne friend ‘Sydney is an artist’s city – glorious … a land of passion-fruit and poetry’.

From 1892 Streeton lived at the Curlew Camp on the harbourside at Mosman, on Cammeraigal and Borogegal land. His bold use of colour and experiments with format and cropping during this time encapsulated the energy of late 19th-century Sydney. In 1896 he held Streeton’s Sydney sunshine exhibition in Melbourne, which was a resounding success, and in 1900 The Bulletin asserted that Streeton was the ‘discoverer of Sydney Harbour’.

Streeton’s greatest 1890s landscapes were painted in regional NSW – in the Blue Mountains, at Gloucester in the Manning district, and on the Hawkesbury River near Richmond and Windsor. Streeton was spurred on by a well-funded acquisitive competition for watercolours of the state’s scenery, initiated in 1891 by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. By this time Melbourne’s boom-time economy had collapsed, and, as Streeton wrote to Tom Roberts early in 1891, ‘this country is full of wealth but somehow can’t afford Artists yet’.

In the same letter he expressed his desire to travel more deeply into the Australian landscape to find subjects for his painting:

I picture in my head the Murray & all the wonder & glory at its source up towards ‘Koscuisko’ [sic] … & the great gold plains, & all the beautiful inland Australia & I love the thought of walking into all this & trying to expand and express it in my way. I fancy large canvases all glowing & moving in the happy light & others bright decorate & chalky & expressive of the hot trying winds & slow immense Summer.

His emphasis on painting distinctive Australian subjects corresponds with a growing nationalism in the lead-up to Federation.

Beginning in France, Symbolism quickly grew into an international avant-garde movement in art and literature that spread across the globe during the last two decades of the 19th century. The Symbolists rejected naturalism in favour of the subjective representation of an idea or emotion, with images of women being the central focus in conveying their concepts.

By the 1890s the Symbolist movement had reached Australian shores and developed its own local inflection. Despite the growing awareness and discussion of the changing social status of women focussed on the women’s suffrage movement, artists (usually male) began to depict women through imagery that fluctuated between virtuous, ethereal beings and deceitful characters of consuming sexuality. Symbolism provided a pretext for more overtly erotic imagery of women than had previously been publicly acceptable in Sydney and Melbourne.

In a handful of paintings produced around 1895, Streeton explored the image of the Symbolist woman, placing her in an antipodean landscape to elaborate on the poetry of place in his own distinct interpretation of the movement. The Symbolist conception of woman as an expression of destruction and desire became a brief platform for artistic experimentation in Streeton’s late-century practice.

By the end of 1896 Streeton was regarded as one of Australia’s leading landscape painters. No longer an impressionist outlier, he was embraced as a colourist and imitated by other artists. While his paintings were still occasionally described as French in style, Streeton rejected this when interviewed in November 1896, claiming that his work ‘is purely and absolutely Australian, not only as regards colour, but in idea and expression’.

Despite strongly identifying as an Australian artist, Streeton joined the exodus of his talented peers to the art centres of Europe. He departed Sydney in January 1897, travelling to London via Cairo and Naples.

Recent research has revealed Streeton held xenophobic views before leaving Australia. He was transfixed by Egypt however, extending his one-week stopover to over two months. He enthused in a letter published in The Bulletin: ‘I’ve been so excited endeavouring to get some of the Cairo brightness in my work’. His paintings of the city’s men and women, lively bazaars and impressive mosques, are engaging while participating in western conventions in depicting the ‘orient’. The firsthand experience of another culture appears to have changed Streeton, who never repeated his previously held views.

Arthur Streeton arrived in London in 1897 and in 1898 seven of his paintings were exhibited in a large survey of contemporary Australian art at the Grafton Galleries organised by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Streeton was singled out in the British press and ‘The purple noon’s transparent might’ was reproduced in The Magazine of Art and The Studio, whose reviewer commented that ‘its admirable drawing and aerial perspective, and its splendid force of colour, would hold its own in any London Gallery’.

Interest in his Australian paintings suggested Streeton would soon establish himself in London, but he became overwhelmed by the competitive London art scene, and his confidence faltered being away from his friends and the scenes of his early successes.

His hardest and hungriest years followed. Yet he found motivation in the famous art from past and present that surrounded him, and in painting a new landscape and light, and doggedly worked through the influence of John Constable, JMW Turner, James Abbott McNeill Whistler and contemporaries such as John Singer Sargent and Philip Wilson Steer. The resulting large-scale, muscular landscapes are supreme examples of Edwardian English painting.

In 1906, after nearly ten years away, Streeton returned to Australia. The impetus for his temporary return was his awareness of a growing regard and market for his work, and a sense that he could support himself overseas by capitalising on his popularity at home. Seeing his family and friends would have undoubtedly also been an incentive, after a difficult period establishing himself in London.

Streeton’s sojourn was a fulfilling and productive time in his career. He reconnected with fellow artists and patrons, organised three commercially successful solo exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne, and painted new Australian works. These show Streeton responding to place by re-engaging with subjects he had tackled earlier in his career. They also reveal how Streeton’s style had matured while he was away, immersed in the new and old art he saw in London and on visits to the continent.

Streeton’s stay in Australia in 1906–07 provided the funds, confidence and inspiration he needed to continue in London. It also encouraged Streeton’s intermittent return to Australia, exhibiting British and European works alongside new Australian paintings, until he re-settled in Melbourne in 1923.

The financial success of Streeton’s Australian exhibitions in 1906–07 meant he could marry his long-term sweetheart, the Canadian-born Nora Clench, whom he had met soon after arriving in London. Nora was an independent, successful violinist leading an all-female quartet, whose business acumen helped Streeton build his own career. Following their marriage in London, the Streetons honeymooned in Venice in May– June 1908.

Streeton took a risk in painting Venice, following in the footsteps of great European and American artists. Yet he was an experienced painter of Sydney’s waterways and relished the challenge of tackling in his own style Venice’s opulent buildings, liquid canals and ‘oriental’ colour and light. Streeton produced an astonishing 80 works on this visit and a subsequent one in September–October.

He was right to back himself and when he exhibited his Venetian views in London in March 1909 he achieved recognition that had eluded him. The Observer critic wrote:

Mr Streeton has caught the opalescent glitter of the Venetian canals and marble palaces in bright moments of sunshine as few artists have done before him.

In July 1909 this success was emulated in Melbourne when he sent works back for the exhibition Arthur Streeton’s Venice.

Streeton was in Australia when Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914. He lost his booked passage to England and was unable to return until February 1915. Too old to fight, he enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps and worked as an orderly at the Third London General Hospital at Wandsworth. Streeton attended to gassed and wounded soldiers, but the long hours and gruelling work took its toll on his health and he was discharged with a War Badge in 1917.

In 1918, after he had lobbied extensively for the appointment, Streeton became an official Australian war artist attached to the 2nd Division, Imperial Force, with the rank of honorary lieutenant. Streeton made two tours to the Western Front in France and witnessed several defining moments during the final stages of the war. He produced over 180 paintings, drawings and watercolours, far in excess of the number he was obliged to make.

Streeton’s closely observed and poignant depictions of ravaged landscapes, damaged buildings and the machinery of war do not explicitly represent warfare or make it heroic. Rather, they describe the incredible damage wrought by mechanised war.

When Streeton visited Australia in 1920, he was struck by Sydney’s urban growth. The following year he told a Daily Telegraph journalist:

The harbour has been frequently painted, but I am surprised that the artists do not paint more pictures of the city – that is, the streets and buildings. There are fine subjects everywhere.

During the 1920s Streeton produced a series of paintings of urban Sydney punctuated by glimpses of the harbour. These postwar paintings were created during a time of rapid expansion and documented the changing skyline as the country settled into a renewed prosperity and Sydney became the commercial heart of Australia. I

n 1936 Streeton extolled the beauty of Sydney’s architecture and surrounds writing in The Sydney Morning Herald:

Her architecture towers up in golden brown stone, and the scarf or belt blowing about her waist is the magic blue harbour.

By that time, Sydney had been a source of inspiration for his paintings for almost 50 years.