Lot 69

 



Acquired directly from the artist by John Thornton of Mount Myrtoon, Victoria circa 1869 (1)



Thence by descent



RELATED WORKS



‘View of Mt Sturgeon and Abrupt from the crater of Baldhill, 29 May 1856’, pencil on paper, 34 x 52 cm, Von Guérard sketchbook, Warrnambool to Mount Zero 1856, National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Matauranga O Aotearoa, Auckland, New Zealand, E-338-f-003



‘Bald Hill 29 May 1856’, pencil on paper, 10.6 x 18.5 cm (each page; double page), Von Guérard Sketchbook  XXV, No.7, May-June 1856, January 1857, Dixson Galleries, State Library of NSW, Sydney, DGB 16 / vol. 4., f. 9



View of Mount Sturgeon and Abrupt from the crater of Bald Hill, an extinct volcano  c.1858, pen and ink and wash over pencil on paper, 33.7 x 50.4 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Felton Bequest 1960 (628-5). (Inscribed in pen and ink l.l. ’17 / Mt Sturgeon & the Vannon / in the Grampians Victoria’)



Mount Abrupt, the Grampians, Victoria, 1856, oil on canvas, 25.8 x 34 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, OA12.1968



 



The Viennese-born Eugen von Guérard arrived in Australia in 1852, drawn by the fabulous goldfields of Ballarat and the chance to strike it rich. A year later he settled in Melbourne, returning to his career as a landscape artist. He travelled widely in Victoria, to South Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand, sometimes with his fellow artist Nicholas Chevalier, or accompanying Alfred William Howitt and Professor Georg Balthasar von Neumayer on their scientific or magnetic survey expeditions. Von Guérard’s paintings and drawings included  commissioned views of pastoral holdings, the spectacular and the sublime. By mid-1856 he was again travelling in the Western District of Victoria, recording its numerous scenic wonders and sheep stations in his field sketchbooks. On the 29 May he reached Bald Hill, making two drawings, including its volcanic crater, with Mounts Sturgeon and Abrupt in the background. Like all his work, they were drawn with such veracity and attention to detail that they enabled him to translate readily his field sketches into presentation drawings or oil paintings at a later time. In August of 1858 he completed a commissioned series of pen and ink drawings, reported in the Melbourne newspaper The Argus as ‘... representing some of the most beautiful portions of our inland, coast, and river scenery... The views include several craters of extinct volcanoes...’.(2) The drawings were commissioned by John Bakewell to take to England. They so appealed to the then Governor of Victoria that he commissioned ‘the artist to execute a series in a similar style’.(3) One of these first fine drawings is the subject of our painting, drawn from the original field sketch, and followed very closely in our oil painting of 1869. Although family tradition has it that von Guérard visited the property and painted the picture on the spot, practice suggests that the oil was derived from the plein air drawing.



 



It was not unusual for von Guérard to paint pictures from drawings well after he first recorded them in his sketchbooks. While the painting View of Mount Abrupt, on the River Wannon, in the Grampians, Western district of Victoria was included in the Victorian Exhibition of Art of December 1856, his drawing recording a bushfire of March 1857 was not translated into oils until 1859. The most famous is his panorama, Old Ballarat as it was in the summer of 1853-4, painted in 1884, (Art Gallery of Ballarat collection) based on a sketch taken during the summer of years before. And so it was with our painting – recorded in the open air of 1856, refined as a brilliant presentation drawing in 1858, and finally celebrated in oil in 1869. From the drawing to the finished painting, von Guérard’s focus moved a little closer. Sheep, cattle and a shepherd were added for topicality and scale – man so small amid the grandeur of nature. While sheep graze in pastures green, cows content, and bird life too, all growing things are stated with uncanny botanical accuracy. Mountains of geological fascination crown the horizon, set grandly against a sky of blue decked with clouds, distant rain in an image of plenitude. The atmosphere is so crystal clear that it accentuates the refined detail. All sparkles in the light that bathes the land of promise, heaven’s bounty is mirrored in the calm waters. True to his portraits of other pastoral properties, von Guérard presents an image of the riches of settlement in the new world.



 



(1) John Marr was the owner of Burri Burri Station, south-east of Dunkeld. He died in 1858. His wife Elizabeth remarried in April 1859 to the Rev. James Parker and remained on the property. John Thornton (1835-1919)  bought the Mt. Myrtoon property in the 1870s. Thornton, who was a celebrated cricketer, lived at Myrtoon for the rest of his life.



(2) Argus, 5 August 1858, p 5



(3) Ibid



 



DAVID THOMAS