National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Turner to Monet: the triumph of landscape

Three bands make up the painting: a blue sky, pink and grey clouds, the green meadow. A tree at left frames the composition, the central haystack provides a point of focus, a few animals add extra interest, and some exquisite reflections persuade us of the artist’s painterly skills. If we were to follow the thin, flat bayou meandering through the marshland, where would it take us? The distant hills have none of the grandeur or drama expected of landscapes at this period. Even the hand of the artist seems peculiarly absent. We are left with a haystack at the centre of the painting which, on closer examination, is a rather strangely shaped mound. Where, exactly, are we? Marshlands – at the mouth of the Parker River in Ipswich, Massachusetts, or Hoboken in New Jersey, or Southport, Connecticut – held a great fascination for Heade; he produced more than a hundred paintings of the subject. These canvases have various descriptive titles: passing or approaching storms, sudden shower, after the rain, sunrise, sun br

For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but its surroundings bring it to life – the air and the light, which vary continually … For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives objects their true value. Monet 18911 As he matured as an artist, Monet returned to the same motif with endless variations: Rouen Cathedral, poplars, haystacks, waterlilies. It was only in this way that he could seek to capture differing effects of light on objects, and changing times of day, as the nominal theme and composition differed only to a small degree. In the ice-floe paintings he made in and after the severe winter of 1892–93, there are even fewer variables, as the dazzlingly colourful effects of sunlight on vegetation or stone surfaces have been eliminated. Monet had addressed the subject of ice breaking up on the Seine – the ‘débacle’ of the title – at least twice before, in 1868 at Bougival, and in 1879–80 at Lavacourt, near Vétheuil. The thirteen Giver

The scene is idyllic; abundant cabbage-tree palms sway on the beach as sea fowls soar above Pellew’s Group of Islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria. In December 1802 the Investigator, under the command of Captain Matthew Flinders, sailed into the Gulf, continuing its arduous circumnavigation of Australia. Aboard the sloop was the young artist William Westall, who produced a wide range of sketches during his Australian voyage. Upon his return to England the Admiralty commissioned nine oil paintings of New Holland, including View of Sir Edward Pellew’s Group, Gulph of Carpentaria 1802. Art historians such as Bernard Smith have recognised that this is an innovative and remarkable painting.1 It is notable both for its heightened sense of light and the well-defined horizontal lines, delicately intersected by palms. In standard Picturesque paintings the foreground is dark and brooding, receding to a light background, usually with one tall feature, such as a tree or a mountain, placed at the side to frame the composit

Constable, one of the foremost British landscape painters of the nineteenth century, first achieved success with his large canvases depicting landscape and life in and around the Stour Valley, which he exhibited between 1819 and 1825. Such was the success of the first of these large paintings, The white horse 1819,1 when Constable exhibited it at the Royal Academy in 1819, that he was elected Associate of the Academy later that year.2 Working on a scale usually reserved for history painting, Constable redefined the notion of a ‘finished’ picture by giving his large landscapes something of the spontaneous freedom and expressive handling of a rapidly painted sketch. The leaping horse is the sixth and the last of these large Stour Valley landscapes and one of the most powerful. Constable chose a place called Float Jump, close to where the course of the old river temporarily left the navigable portion of the Stour. It also marked the boundary between the counties of Essex and Suffolk. The jump itself consisted o

De Wint is widely known for his expansive vistas of flat landscape executed with a confident breadth of handling. His peaceful, open, often sunny, always optimistic and productive landscapes and rural scenes seem oblivious to, or perhaps consciously avoid, the social upheavals of his time, brought about by the Industrial Revolution. As the novelist William Thackeray wrote, ‘[One] might have called for a pot of port at seeing one of De Wint’s haymakings … everything basked lazily for him, and one wondered whether he remained torpid in winter’.1 De Wint’s works are nostalgic and romantic scenes of reaction. He produced simple watercolour sketches of Dutch-like flat landscapes, often taken around Lincoln in south-eastern England. They showed grain-harvesting and haymaking, or conventionally imposing views that included such institutional subjects as cathedrals, county houses and castles. De Wint painted the subject of Kenilworth Castle many times. This is a large exhibition watercolour, the biggest and most hig

Palmer’s landscapes are among the major achievements of the British genre in the first half of the nineteenth century. Though he was admired especially for his early intensely visionary landscapes, Palmer’s later work is more conventional, showing greater concern both for naturalism and looking to the acknowledged seventeenth-century masters of landscape painting. In Summer storm near Pulborough, Sussex black clouds have gathered, the wind has risen and driving rain is already falling, though there is a glimpse of distant sunshine. In the foreground a herdsman gestures to prevent his sheep stampeding off the road; his wife follows carrying a child on her back and beside her is an unhappy yet faithful dog. To the left, near a steadfast windmill and a ruined church, women scurry to retrieve their washing. At the edge of the darkness a horse-drawn wagon and a rider stoically proceed towards a farmhouse visible beyond the mill. Within the darkness, sunlight illuminates the travellers, the roadside stream and bri

When Glover arrived in Hobart in 1831, the thirty-year conflict between the Tasmanian Aborigines and the European settlers was nearing an end. During this time George Augustus Robinson – the appointed Protector of Aborigines – had been relocating the majority of two hundred Indigenous people to Flinders Island. Only two months before he left Hobart for his new property of Patterdale in northern Tasmania, Glover made two group portraits showing twenty-six members of the Big River and Oyster Bay Aboriginal tribes before their transfer to Flinders Island. They became the subject of a number of significant paintings. Painted in 1832, the year of his move to Patterdale, A corrobery of natives in Mills Plains is Glover’s finest and probably earliest Aboriginal subject. Although the artist’s sketchbook contains a corroboree drawing for this landscape, he could not possibly have seen such an event on his property. As there were probably no Aborigines left in the area and certainly not enough to engage in a corroboree

Like Pissarro, in his series of Boulevard Montmartre paintings (cat. 83), the Australian Roberts drew inspiration from Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines 1873.1Although we cannot be certain whether, or when, Roberts saw Monet’s painting, the affinities between the works are compelling.2Monet’s, Roberts’s and Pissaro’s paintings all demonstrate a remarkable ability to capture the hustle and bustle of city life; they share an elevated viewpoint, reduced palette, and fractured brushstrokes. Moreover the three artists also embody a determination to embrace modernity: Paris after the Haussmann era, on the one hand, and the energy and excitement of ‘marvellous Melbourne’ on the other. Allegro con brio: Bourke Street west is a lively composition, painted with spirit. The Italian part of the title is a musical term, a playing instruction meaning ‘quickly, with brilliance’. It is one of a group of works painted by Roberts on his return to Australia from London in 1885. Back in Melbourne he resumed his friendship with Fr

The Australian Sketcher of November 1873 shows von Guérard’s grand Kosciusko painting displayed at the Vienna Exhibition with other contributions from the Australian colonies. It and another of the artist’s paintings, Cape Woolamai 1872, are surrounded by photographs and maps, produce, flora and fauna, as well as a case of mineral samples and other specimens of interest.1There is some irony here. Von Guérard detailed the lichen on rocks in North-east view from the northern top of Mount Kosciusko – most noticeably on the platform on which the cloaked figure stands – but other parts are less convincing. When von Guérard arrived in Australia in 1852 he was already an established artist, having trained in Rome and Düsseldorf. He had probably seen works by Friedrich; Carus’s published writings also circulated widely during the 1830s and 1840s, the periods of von Guérard’s study at the Staatliche Kunstakademie. In his new southern homeland the artist familiarised himself with native flora by sketching in the Melbo

Long revered as Monet’s most exquisite series, the Haystack paintings are remarkable for the range of light and weather conditions portrayed. In Haystacks, midday the edges of the stacks shimmer in the heat, and sunlight appears to radiate from the structures themselves. Elsewhere, in the snow scenes, the forms seem to absorb light. The practical nature of the stacks – a means of storing the harvest – receives less attention. When the sheaves of wheat or oats were cut, the cereal stacks were thatched with straw and left to stand until spring, and the arrival of the threshing machines that moved between villages. For a country still smarting from the effects of the Franco–Prussian war – and in a period when France seemed to be rapidly overtaken by industrialised Britain, Germany, the United States or even Russia – Monet’s choice of motif, like the series of poplar paintings that followed, was reassuringly French. The haystacks resonate with notions of rural productivity and the relative harmony of country life

have always loved the immense streets of Paris, shimmering in the sun, the crowds of all colours, those beautiful linear and aerial perspectives, those eccentric fashions, etc. But how to do it? To install oneself in the middle of the street is impossible in Paris. Ludovic Piette, letter to Pissarro 18721 Early in 1897 Pissarro began a series of paintings of the intersection of the boulevards Montmartre, Haussmann and des Italiens with the rues de Richelieu and Drouot. Between 10 February and 17 April he painted fourteen views looking east along the Boulevard Montmartre, and a further two towards the Boulevard des Italiens. From the 1860s Baron Haussmann’s interventions transformed Paris. The narrow, winding streets of the medieval city – easily barricaded in the 1848 revolution – were destroyed. Approximately 150 kilometres of road were constructed, with long avenues, apartments of a standard height, public gardens, the Paris Opéra and other public buildings, new bridges, gas lamps, a new water supply and

Turner had never made any drawings [watercolours] like these before, and never made any like them again … He is not showing his hand in these, but his heart.1 An inveterate traveller, Turner visited Switzerland on his first continental tour in 1802, during the short-lived Treaty of Amiens. He was greatly inspired by the sublime qualities of the alpine landscape, although he did not return until 1836. However during his later years he visited continental Europe regularly, travelling through Switzerland annually from 1841 to 1844. The resulting watercolours are acknowledged as some of his most important works; a final flourish in his extraordinary output. In the late summer of 1841 Turner spent time in Lucerne, exploring its surrounding mountains, valleys and lakes. One of the best-known local features is the Rigi, a mountain comparatively small in height (1798 metres) but with a dominant presence to the east of the town across Lake Lucerne. Unlike the numerous tourists who ascended the Rigi to witness sunset