Under a Modern Sun: Art in Queensland 1930s–1950s

227 The tropical north 226 Under a Modern Sun: Art in Queensland 1930s–1950s ARTHUR EVAN READ Arthur Evan Read’s distinctive vision of north Queensland came to national attention in 1954 when he was awarded the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s Wynne Prize for landscape painting for Cooktown 1954 (University of New South Wales, Sydney). Born in the inner-city Melbourne suburb of North Fitzroy, Read studied at the National Gallery School in the mid 1930s while supporting himself as a farmhand. Around this time, he made his first trip to north Queensland with fellow artist Laurence Scott Pendlebury. 1 Read spent 1949 in Musgrave (now Flying Fish Point), near Innisfail, and stayed there again from 1950 to 1956, working variously as a canecutter, house painter and storekeeper before moving to Brisbane. 2 These experiences would translate into his sympathetic and atmospheric paintings of the north’s cane-growing regions. Art critic Dr Gertrude Langer noted these qualities in her 1955 review of Read’s exhibition at the Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, remarking on: . . . the moist cloud-laden skies, the monsoonal weather, the brooding sun and . . . the quiet little townships of the north where life goes on at a leisurely pace. One can sense the painter’s humility in front of the subject in trying not to impose his own mood but in grasping the mood of the place. 3 In 1955, Read won the Queensland National Art Gallery’s H.C. Richards Memorial Prize with The cane town 1955. Despite the work’s generic title, and Read’s assertion that many of his paintings were composites, the town depicted is identifiable as Mossman. The signage on the hotel and the Photoplay Cinema next to the pub locate the scene as Mossman’s Mill Street — the chimneys of the mill are visible in the mid-ground and the cane train and tracks in the centre of the composition are distinguishing features of the township. 4 Notes 1 Glenn R Cooke, QAGOMA research files. 2 Cooke. 3 Gertrude Langer, ‘Art review: Read, interpreter of the tropical coastline’, Courier-Mail , 13 April 1955, The Johnstone Gallery Archive, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane. 4 Cooke. Arthur Evan Read , The cane town 1955