Word: australian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...great difference between Australian and American landscape experience in the early 19th century was that Americans tended to see their wilderness as God's promise, whereas Australians emphatically didn't. Northeastern America had been settled by free, self-exiled Puritans, convinced of their sacred mission to convert "the Lord's waste," the forests of New England, into a place fit for God's elect. In the 17th century the Wild West was in the East, but by the early 19th the frontier had moved thousands of miles westward, taking with it the same optimistic, sacramental fantasy, translating it into...
Still, in early Australia as in America, what artists' clients wanted was the imagery of success and progress in claiming and settling the land. Early 19th century Australian painters, like their counterparts in America, thus showed little interest in painting the wild--until it became a tourist sight. They did farms, villages, settled acres--images that would attract new settlement...
...there's a similarity between an American painter of sublime, theatrical Western scenery like Albert Bierstadt and an Australian one like the more modest Eugene von Guerard, it isn't accidental. Both received the same training at the Dusseldorf Academy and acquired skill at the tight, glossy, detailed rendering of grandiose scenes. Von Guerard joined the gold rush to Australia in 1852 but failed as a prospector, and made a career for 30 years painting two kinds of scenery: portraits of the settled acres of the well-to-do pastoralists; and views of more exotic wildness, from the bizarrely sculpted...
...last step in the creation of 19th century Australian landscape was taken by the group known as the Australian Impressionists, whose most gifted members were Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts. Between them they created a landscape idiom that would last for decades and is still enormously popular there today: the blue-and-gold bush, with its clear light and exquisite transparencies. They weren't Impressionists in the orthodox, French sense--their work had nothing to do with Monet, for instance; their sources lay in late 19th century French realism and, above all, in the work of Whistler...
Roberts aspired to paint vigorous narratives of national identity, of hard, challenging work in the bush: A Break Away!, 1891, his rendering of young jackeroos (Australian for cowboys) galloping furiously to head off a stampeding mob of sheep, remains a national icon a century later. Streeton painted not wilderness but settled pastoral land, framed by vast space. In The Purple Noon's Transparent Might, 1896 (the title is from Shelley: culturally, England still bore strongly on these highly nationalist artists), the high-keyed light and crisp, decisive brushwork create a broad, deep and coherent space brimming with heat...