Bushfire: Our community responds
Fiery Evocations

The National Gallery of Victoria is delighted to present Bushfire: Our community responds in the Jreissati Family Gallery, as a contribution to the Government of Victoria’s establishment of the Bushfire Recovery Appeal Fund. The terror and awe of bushfire have been constant themes in the creation of our national imagery, and we have been fortunate to secure a group of highly important loans to add to those works already in the collections of the NGV. I would like to thank in particular Ann-Marie Schwirtlich and Shane Carmody of the State Library of Victoria who have contributed William Strutt’s monumental and awe-inspiring Black Thursday, February 6th. 1851, an unforgettable document of this frightening aspect of the mid-nineteenth century colonial experience.

Margaret Rich, Director of the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, has also responded generously – and at very short notice – to make available a group of significant works, including Eugène von Guérard’s Bush Fire between Mt Elephant and Timboon 1859. Lyn Williams, Michael White, the University of Melbourne Art Collection, and John Wolseley have offered key works from their collections. The result of this rapid response from the arts community in Victoria is now here for all Victorians and visitors to Victoria to see and be moved by.

The exhibition documents the frequency with which Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists have depicted the phenomenon of bushfire. It is interesting to reflect that other artists, in other places and at other times, have also dealt with the theme, and that the terror of man and animals depicted in Strutt’s Black Thursday has fascinating precedents. In his Lives of the Most Famous Painters of 1550, the Italian Renaissance artist and critic Vasari wrote of a now lost work by Francesco Francia:

And Francia’s fame was increased immeasurably by a pair of harnesses which the Duke of Urbino had him paint, on which he depicted a huge forest of trees set alight by fire, and emerging from it a great number of animals of both land and air, and some figures, a thing truly awesome, terrifying and most beautiful.

The Florentine artist Piero di Cosimo painted a number of significant works around 1500–05 depicting forest fires, the best known of which is The forest fire now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Piero di Cosimo used passages from the De rerum natura (Concerning natural things) by the Roman philosopher Lucretius, who described in detail a forest fire when dealing with the mythology of the fire god, Vulcan. Piero di Cosimo produced an extraordinarily naturalistic image of fire itself, with the exhausted and confused animals which have fled before it evoking a sense of doom. In so many ancient mythologies fire is deeply symbolic but double-edged; it has the power to destroy but is also a creative force and the key to life and civilization.

In renaissance and post-renaissance Italian art, The Forge of Vulcan is a common subject, the god using fire to create metal objects for military, agricultural and domestic use. It was the harnessing of fire which transformed humankind from the Stone Age to the Iron and Bronze Ages.

Fire, therefore, needs to be understood in all its manifestations. The artists whose works constitute this thought-provoking exhibition have depicted as their subjects unharnassed fire and the havoc it can wreak.

The genesis and production of this exhibition must have created some kind of record: barely three weeks have elapsed since we devised the idea of an exhibition on the theme of Bushfire, through discussions with Penny Hutchinson of Arts Victoria, to the creation of a carefully selected and well-curated show with an illustrated catalogue. I must express my thanks to our Deputy Director, Frances Lindsay, and all the NGV staff who have willingly added this task to the many extra duties already imposed by our redevelopment program. Our Minister, the Hon. Mary Delahunty, has enthusiastically supported the project and we thank her and her staff for their involvement.

I would also like to thank most warmly the Gandel Charitable Trust, the Jack Brockhoff Foundation, and RACV Insurance, the sponsors of this exhibition. Like everyone else associated with it, they have risen to the occasion and have given us their immediate expressions of support.

We hope that everyone who enjoys the show will give generously to the Victorian Bushfire Recovery Appeal Fund.

Gerard Vaughan
Director, National Gallery of Victoria