Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

1890s was greeted with enthusiasm by local reviewers and artists. There was optimism that a continued presence by these artists would assist the development of the local art scene, and although few continued to exhibit with the Society after the turn of the century, and the works sent were not of the highest quality, Brisbane did experience at least a limited exposure to their work.28 The most notable Brisbane artist experimenting with the style was a student and colleague of Rivers, F. J. Martyn Roberts, whose painting Evening (Mt Coot-tha from Dutton Park) (QAG) shows that by 1898, some five years before Under the jacaranda was painted, at least one influential local artist was using the impressionists' broad- brushed technique to depict a landscape in the afterglow — a favourite pictorial device of the Heidelberg School artists. Roberts had spent a short time in Sydney during the 1890s under the tutelage of Julian Ashton, and he had painted en plein air with a number of other members of Sydneys avant-garde. Evening ... was immediately recognised as a 'modem' work at its display in the Queensland Art Society's 1898 Annual Exhibition, the same exhibition in which Rivers showed his very orthodox Shall we join the ladies?. Roberts's painting shared the Society's prizes that year with J. H. Granger's A full tide, which on the foremost rocks touching up, jetted in spurts o f wild sea smoke (Tennyson), and the Brisbane Courier reviewed the work with guarded enthusiasm: Mr Roberts is an impressionist, and an exponent of much of the broad modem school of work ... Altogether the picture is a very vigorous and distinctly convincing suggestion, and a promise of the future excellence of the artist is contained in it .29 Roberts's style attracted much local attention, and many years later it was regretted that he had not been able to paint more prolifically, due to his teaching commitments at the Brisbane Technical College where he succeeded Rivers as Supervisor of the Art Department:30 He was somewhat in advance of his time ... had the opportunity been his to continue more Left R. Godfrey Rivers An alien in Australia C.1904 Oil on canvas 106.9x118.1cm Gift of the Godfrey Rivers Trust 1940 Queensland Art Gallery F. J. Martyn Roberts 1871-1963 Evening (Mt Coot-tha from Dutton Park) 1898 Oil on canvas 74x125.1cm Purchased 1997 with funds from MIM Holdings Limited through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation as a practising painter than as a tutor he would have held a place to-day with Streeton, Gmner, and Lambert. His work and that of Streeton was [sic] very similar in those far-off days .31 Godfrey Rivers was never to enjoy such a comparison with the exalted Streeton, but it would not be fair to say that his work entirely lacked a contemporary edge. In Under the jacaranda, Rivers provided visitors to the Queensland Art Society's 1903 Annual Exhibition with a timely view of life and class in their own city. By painting a landscape that was both urban-based and recreational, Rivers was engaging with subject matter that had gained much popularity in European art during the latter half of the nineteenth century — the depiction of the leisure pursuits of the newly affluent and powerful middle classes. If visitors who saw the work at the exhibition did not immediately recognise the jacaranda tree as the one growing in Brisbane's Botanic Gardens, the maid provided them with a further clue: she wears the uniform of the waitresses who worked at the Gardens' Kiosk. The Gardens were the favoured location for recreational and sporting activities in the city, and there were facilities for tennis, cricket, football and croquet.32The less energetic could stroll along the shaded paths and planted borders, listening to the bands playing in the bandstand, or dining al fresco as part of the many picnic parties that gathered on the lawns, or at the Kiosk, which was a popular spot for afternoon teas.33The Gardens were alive with activity, as one late nineteenth-century visitor discovered, noting that on entering the grounds he 'found labels and Latin names, nursemaids, perambulators, grassy slopes, and children to my heart's content'.34Rivers often turned to the Gardens for subject matter or for a vantage point from which to paint other aspects of the city.35 Rivers's representation of modern urban life in Under the jacaranda is safe and conventional. There is no sense of risk or unpredictability, no feeling for Charles Baudelaire's vision of a modernity exemplified by 'the random, the fugitive, the accidental', which Virginia Spate (among others) has recognised in the transience and spontaneity of Australian works such as Tom Roberts's ! 'Allegro con brio, Bourke Street West' c.1886 (National Library of Australia)36Instead we are presented with a carefully staged image which communicates ease, respectability and self-assuredness. In this painting Rivers is neither bohemian flâneur nor rugged bushman, but a pillar of urban society, dining in gardens that boasted some of the city's most important or exclusive buildings, including Government House,37Parliament House, and the prestigious Queensland Club. The Brisbane of Godfrey and Selina Rivers in Under the jacaranda is not a frontier town with a 'make-do' ethos, but one in which residents (at least those enjoying the Rivers's vantage point) could experience all the comforts of life. Painted in the early years of a new century, and at the beginning of another stage of Brisbane's development as the capital of a newly federated State, Under the jacaranda may be read as a statement of the artist's pivotal role in Brisbane's cultural life over the previous decade. Here is Rivers's announcement that he has left his indelible stamp on the city, writing Brisbane into Australia's cultural history not with a thumbnail dipped in tar, but in an elegant and decorative copperplate. Sarah Tiffin is Senior Project Officer, International Exhibitions, at the Queensland Art Gallery. LOOKING FOR THE 'BEAU MONDE' IN BRISBANE 93