Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

smaller as a counterpoint to the procession of the girl with her brolgas. They serve to define the space as though it were a theatre stage, with the brolgas dancing across it. In Spirit o f the Plains, clutter is eliminated, the whole piece reduced to one glorious motif. As the critic of the Sydney Mail wrote: 'It is a poetic and imaginative picture, in soft and myrtle greys, and the idea of the queer Australian bird and its enchantress is very cleverly handled'.9 It was an easy painting for critics of the 1890s to read. The unknown critic of the Daily Telegraph gave the most detailed analysis, and the most favourable: Mr Sid Long seldom touches canvas without decorating it. His 'Spirit of the Plains' this year is no exception. It is essentially Australian, beautifully decorative, and full of feeling. The graceful sweep in the composition, along the group of 'native companions', weirdly capering to the soughing of the winds, and culminating in the clump of trees to the left, leaves nothing to be desired. Probably a lot of Mr Long's candid friends will wish that 'he paid a little more attention to his figures', but it is a great question whether the young lady who symbolises the soughing of the wind could be carried a scrap further without injury to the whole effect .10 The art critic of the Bulletin, possibly D. H. Souter, describes the painting as a dim nymph leading a flock of birds through a dreamy sensuous colour scheme — has the sweet seduction of Keats'.1 The Bulletin also parodied Spirit o f the Plains in a Souter cartoon, with the sprite satirically replaced by a drunken swaggy, while the response by the Sydney Morning Herald writer is a reminder that the instant judgements of art critics sometimes look less than perceptive in hindsight. He wrote that the painting: at first provokes a smile, if a little eccentric, is still a clever example of quasi-decorative art, but the civic eye is not accustomed to the weird looking birds of the crane species which form the subject of the picture. These native companions straggle across the scene after an idyllic shepherdess with a pipe, and the grey monotonous charm of the Western plains makes itself felt .12 The general consensus, though, was that Long was creating an authentic Australian 78 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965