Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

Above Girolamo Nerli Street scene on a rainy night C.1890 Oil on composition board 31x23.2cm Purchased 1951 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Facing page Walter Withers Australia 1854-1914 Wet day c.1892 Oil on composition board 25.5x32.6cm Purchased 1982 with funds from Jack, David and Melissa Mantón through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation did Streeton begin his cycle of grand vistas in which he successfully fused nationalist feeling with the landscape itself. Heidelberg was not Streeton's discovery, for it was already a popular beauty spot where Louis Buvelot had painted twenty years before; but certainly it was Streeton who claimed artistic possession' of the ramshackle house on C. M. Daviess Eaglemont estate.3 Blind to Heidelberg's much vaunted picturesqueness, Streeton was inspired instead by the splendid panoramic view of the Yarra basin from his hilltop house: I sit on our hill of gold, on the north side, the wind seems sunburnt & firey [sic] as it runs through my beard ... Yes, I sit here in the upper circle surrounded by copper & gold & smile joy under my fly net as all the light, glory & quivering brightness passes slowly & freely before my eyes.4 From this 'upper circle' vantage-point Streeton painted Golden summer, Eaglemont 1889 (National Gallery of Australia) and Still Glides the Stream, and Shall For Ever Glide 1890 (The Art Gallery of New South Wales). The former — awarded an honourable mention at the Paris Salon in 1892 and sold on the first day of the exhibition — recently achieved the status of national 'icon' because of its selection as the key image for the Australian blockbuster touring exhibition 'Golden Summers' in 1985-86, and its purchase by the National Gallery of Australia in 1995.5The latter work — exhibited at the Victorian Artists' Society in 1890, when it was purchased for the Art Gallery of New South Wales — is the work associated with the picture under discussion, Sketch for 'Still glides the stream, and shall for ever glide' 1895. The views depicted in Still Glides the Stream and Sketch for 'Still glides the stream' are not the same: the former looks east towards the rising full moon, whereas, in the latter, artist and viewer have moved further left (northwards) along the ridge and have turned to look back (to the south-east) over the river. As the Sketch is dated 1895, it cannot literally be the sketch for the larger painting. Terry Smith has explained away the discrepancy: 'Presumably the inscription is a product of the 1920s — eager market, vague memories^ The date and/or the inscription might well be incorrect: Streeton is known to have signed and dated many of his early works after his return from England in 1920, and his memory for facts and figures was demonstrably imperfect. But there is a chronological problem with Streeton's Sketch postdating his Still Glides the Stream only if we persist with the outmoded idea of a sketch being a preparatory stage in painting, rather than it being a work in its own right. Streeton's Sketch could well represent his return to the approximate scene of his earlier painting in order to render a familiar landscape in a new way, a way more appropriate to his vision. In 1890, when he painted Still Glides the Stream, Streeton was struggling with the normal division of a picture into fore-, middle- and backgrounds. Roberts and McCubbin had privileged the foreground in their Box Hill paintings; however, Streeton was interested in the broad sweep of the middle distance. To him the foreground was a nuisance. Hence the startling awkwardness of the foreground of Still Glides the Stream : at a conventional distance from the painting on the gallery wall the viewer reads the grassy ridge as the artist intended, but closer inspection reveals it to be a coarsely painted vertical barrier that separates us from (rather than leading us towards) the seductive middleground beyond. Only later did Streeton perfect his vision by eliminating this annoying obstacle altogether, thereby propelling the viewer straight into the middle distance. This dramatic shift in Streeton's picture organisation has been previously remarked upon in his sequence of paintings of the Hawkesbury River in 1896; however, the change was already clearly in train in this Sketch of the Yarra River in 1895, among the last of his Heidelberg paintings. About the time that Streeton was painting Still Glides the Stream from Eaglemont's 'upper circle', Walter Withers was there too, painting his own Yarra valley scene.7 Although dismissed by Streeton in 1934 as merely one of 'the older artists of Melbourne' who was 'present at some 72 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965