Word: streeton
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Dates: during 1998-1998
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...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...
Such paintings are among the best landscapes of the late 19th century, not just in Australia but anywhere. They realize the ambition Streeton described in a letter to Roberts, his painting buddy: "I fancy large canvases all glowing and moving in the happy light, and others bright decorative and chalky and expressive of the hot trying winds and the slow immense summer." But the immensity doesn't dwarf or trivialize the works of man, and this skill at conveying what is pleasurable in landscape is part of the key to Streeton's unfading popularity in his own country...
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