Curio

State Library of New South Wales
Sketchbook

Sketchbook

1888–89
Pencil, pen and wash drawings on paper
Bequest of Sir William Dixson, 1952
DL PX78

Arthur Streeton is often seen as one of the first colonial landscape painters to ‘truly’ see the Australian landscape. With his dry palette and impressionistic style, he captured the intensity of its harsh light. During the late 1880s, when he was in his early 20s, he became part of the painting movement often referred to as the Heidelberg School, named after an artists’ camp some 11km northeast of Melbourne. When dealer A H Spencer offered this sketchbook to Sir William Dixson in 1924, he told him that it was made by Streeton ‘during his best period’.* By the 1920s, Streeton’s position as Australia’s greatest landscape painter was well entrenched.

This sketchbook, however, reveals Streeton’s genuine talent as a draughtsman. Its contains largely pencil, ink and monochrome wash drawings of great confidence, liveliness and flair, skills which underpinned the success of his oil painting. This wash drawing of a young man declaiming his love in song is bold, strong and humorous, and shows that Streeton’s interests were much broader than the hot Australian bush. Also included in the sketchbook are pen and ink portrait sketches of his family and friends, snippets of romantic poetry, and an apparent shopping list.

Truth of the landscape

Whether Arthur Streeton was the first European artist to ‘truly paint’ the Australian landscape or really understand the gum tree depends very much on perspective and time. In the 1860s, Eugene von Guérard’s paintings were praised for their perceptive interpretation of southeastern Australia; in the 1940s Russell Drysdale’s harsh paintings of the Australian interior seemed to reveal a new truth about the landscape; in the 1960s the abstracted oils by Fred Williams offered a very contemporary take on the bush. Yet none of these visions are the truth: each, however, reflects their time, and provides a unique understanding of place and culture. The art of Streeton, and of fellow artists like Tom Roberts and Fred McCubbin, was certainly fresh and provokingly modern to their peers, but it did not emerge uniquely inspired by the Australian landscape: many of its features evolved in the broader context of European art in general and the British Newlyn School of artists in particular, who were similarly inspired by light, plain air (or out doors) painting and naturalism rather than French impressionism.