Australian Impress­ion­ist Art exhibition now on in Canberra - don't they mean Heidelberg art?

We were often told that Eugene von Guerard (1811–1901)’s Australian landscapes of the 1860s and 70s were indebted to the romantic art of Caspar David Friedrich, two generations earlier, or that there was an affinity between­ his work and that of Amer­ic­an landscape painters like Frederic Church. But Christopher Allen (The Australian 8th Oct 2017) wrote that if von Guerard’s style was dist­inct­ive, the sociocultural milieu within which he worked in Australia was also significantly differen­t from that of the Americans to whom he was sometimes comp­ar­ed.

The USA established the core of its identity as a nation around the Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1776. The found­ing fath­ers of the new nation were men of the Enlightenment. A century later, America was a great modern industrial nation that had absorbe­d many more influences, including romantic sensib­ility and religious re­vivalism. So by the time Church and his colleagues painted their luminous, sublime landscapes, America was already an established nation with a strong sense of its own identity. Their landscapes evoked westward expansion, and the discov­ery of the­ wilderness as a spiritual symbol.

In von Guerard’s time Australia had not yet reached a comparable level of national identity. Federation (1/1/1901) was still more than a gen­era­tion away and post gold-rush colonial society was growing rapidly, with a boom in urban population. Australia was still transitioning from a coll­ect­ion of small colonies.

Bourke Street West, 1886, by Tom Roberts,
Credit: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 

Down on his luck. 1889, by Frederick McCubbin
Credit: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Two decades later, in the 1880s, the Heid­elberg School was named after an area in outer Melbourne where they started painting en plein air. Fred­erick McCubbin (1855-1917), Tom Roberts (1856–1931), Arthur Streeton (1867–1943), Walters Withers (1854—1914) and some­times Charles Conder (1868–1909) achieved a more con­fid­ent sense of belonging. Admit­ted­ly drawing on naturalist and Impress­ionist ideas, they turned from inspiring sub­jects to farming set­tings. They sought to capture Australian life, the bush and the harsh sunlight that typ­if­ied this country, and a more confident sense of settlement. 

Some of the loveliest pictures done by the Heidelbergers were the little oil sketches on cigar box lids that composed the fam­ou­s 9 x 5 Impression Exhibition in Melbourne in 1889. Note the use of the term Impression­ist here, as explained in Table Talk magazine in June 1889.

So why did the 2007 exhibition at the NGV, Australian Impress­ion­ism, call the most loved group of Australian artists “impres­s­ionists”, not “Heidelbergers”. The title of the 2007 exhibition reflected the view that Heidelberg School art was a credible Australian expression of the move towards natur­al­istic, plein-air painting that was popular in France, acr­oss Europe and in North America. Aust­ral­ians were part of internationalism and modernity!

Even as recently as 2016, the Nat­ion­al Gallery of Australia sent Australia’s Impressionists Exhib­ition to London’s National Gal­l­ery. But British critics were puzzled. Streeton’s Fire’s On! (1891) was far from what they thought of as Im­pressio­nism, and Roberts’s A Break Away! (1891) could not be fitted into a European framework.

I created the same mix-up in this blog, absorbing the spec­ific­ally Australian Heidelberg School into International Impres­sion­ism. “By 1901, Elioth Gruner’s first work was accepted for hanging in the Society of Artists Spring Show. See the small oil sketches of Sydney beaches 1912-4, very much in the tradition of the 9 x 5 Impressions shown at Buxton’s Rooms in Melbourne in Aug 1889. Gruner claimed his big influence was Roberts, possibly explaining why he was event­ually seen as the heir to the Impress­ion­ist past­oral tradition of Australian art of the Heidelberg school”. 

Now Allen is asking us to understand the specif­icity of C19th Aus­tralian art, distinguishing it from the superficially com­parable Impressionism in Europe or the USA. Consider the times. In 1870-71, France was humiliatingly defeat­ed in the Franco-Prussian War, Emperor Napoleon III abdicated, the republic was proclaimed and Paris was besieged by the German army. Then it was taken over by a radical movement called the Commune 1871, which was quickly put down in a bloody repression.

There was little sign of any of these traum­at­ic ev­ents in the Impressionists’ art. French Impress­ion­ism was specif­ic­ally react­ing to historical circumstances by avoiding the pain. Their emphasis was on the per­s­onal, authentic experience of transient phenomena. In  Claude Mon­et’s idyllic Le bassin d’Argenteuil (1872), the emph­asis was on delight in the clearing clouds and dawn light. French Im­pres­s­ionism wanted nothing to do with nat­ionalist themes.

The Heidelberg painters, on the other hand, were intimately connected to the nationalist spirit in pre-Federation Aus­t­ralia. For ex­amp­le see Roberts’s por­trait of a young Austral­ian woman, An Aus­tralian Native (1888). And Streeton’s Golden Summer Eaglemont (1889) was an early morning scene with long dawn shadows and moving shade. The emphasis here was about inhabiting this land. The rising sun covered the Australian land in typical baking hot heat.

Charles Conder was never as clearly focused on nationa­list identity as Roberts or Streeton. But Conder still contributed to the theme of being at ease in a new land, in works like The Yarra Heidelberg (1890).

Australia’s Impressionists exhibition in London, 2017
Credit: National Gallery London
Fire’s On, 1891, by Arthur Streeton is on the right hand side. See it more clearly in Australian Bush Fires in Art 

Of course these images had little in common with Monet and the other Im­pressionists’ palette. Rather than a high-keyed French palette, most of the pictures were tonal a la JAM Whistler. And they were less often studies of natural effects and more about modern life in Mel­bourne­ or in the rural outer suburbs, the booming economy and travel.

Allen made a couple of exceptions. The late paintings of Mc­Cub­bin and turn of the century work by Emanuel Phillips Fox, Ethel Car­rick Fox, John Peter Russell and Tudor St George Tucker were more directly taken from French Impress­ionism, but only because those artists had direct contact with the Fren­ch. I agree. Phillips Fox had no major social or political theme, and the lei­sured life he depicted was not particularly Australian. Phillips Fox left Australia in 1887, before the inspirat­ion of the Heidelberg artists’ camps had fully developed. And he was outside Aus­tralia during all the nat­ional­ist excitem­ent leading up to Federat­ion. Like Mary Cassatt, Auguste Renoir and Berthe Morisot, Phillips Fox’s long white Ed­wardian dresses capt­ur­ed the light and atmosphere of a summer's day anywhere. 

The exhibition "Australian Impress­ion­ism" is open at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra until the end of Oct