Jubilee exhibition of Australian art

E A R L Y C O L O N I A L ART By Clive Turnbull EP A R L Y C O L O N I A L A R T is often charming; it is nearly always useful also. I t was m e a n t t o i n f o r m and, although we may most certainly believe t ha t the artist took pleasure in it, his principal purpose, as a rule, was to make a record to take a picture,' in the phrase that we have carried over to photography, a picture of aborigines, kangaroos, colonial houses or country vistas, to let people in the homelands know what Australia was like or fix familiar scenes for the satisfaction o f the settlers in after years. Some o f the early artists were craftsmen who p u t their skill to the use o f science or exploration. Others were amateurs dabbling in sketching. Some were convicts with . , ( r a f t skills who began to practise them in the community when they became relatively free men. And yet others were professional painters o f stature who came to settle in Australia and, as a rule, strove to make a living by painting and teaching. A considerable body o f work remains to us from this first three-quarters o f a century of our history, and the best of it has a double charm for us to-day—as art a o f the way our country looked to our forefathers. Fo r they saw it, o f course, as Europeans. T h e aborigines looked to them like Re d Indians or Polynesians, the trees like English trees o r approximations to them. Not until quite late in our story did our artists begin to paint things as we in t u r n have come to see them. T h e earliest artists o f all, who accompanied the navigatorc. and the first adminis- trators, were concerned almost entirely with scientific records o f birds a nd animals a n d with scenery and occasionally with very unscientific records of aborigines. Until settlement h a d proceeded for some time in New South Wales and Va n Diemen's Land, there was, o f course, not a great deal else to record, but, even so, arlists were seldom concerned with h uma n beings in action, and certainly not with huma n beings o f a lowly order. T h e aim of privileged amateurs was to please themselves and the aim o f the un- privileged was to please the privileged to their own economic advantage. Wh a t pleased the privileged was very mu c h o f a muchness with wha t would have pleased a pa t r on in the England o f the time watercolourdrawings o f pleasant houses set in pleasant vistas a nd looking as much like English country houses in English parklands as possible; still- life--flowers and fruit a n d game, and so on a nd portrait sketches, although, in the earliest days, there was perhaps only Wainewright, the forger and suspected poisoner, with sufficient skill to execute these with grace. Only when the gold rush o f the 'fifties upset the old ordered society do we find a brief appearance o f genre the depiction of subjects o f common life in the watercolour drawings of S. T. Gill, which deal in a crude and vigorous way with a crude a nd vigorous life, treating o f events dealt with in a more genteel if less amusing fashion by such con- temporaries as William Strutt. On e of the liveliest o f Gill's sketches is the Subscription Ball, Ballarat. This kind o f work would scarcely have appealed to the earlier world o f red- 45 CONRAD MARTENS. Looking East over Circular Quay, about 838. Watercolour coated officers, ringleted misses a n d portly merchants, b u t the Gold Rush itself destroyed the remnants o f that world. Despite the wide appeal o f his sketches, Gill seems to have 9 8