The idea of place is central to this exhibition, which explores how artists’ responses to different landscapes shaped the evolution of Impressionism in Australia. It is important to recognise that the visions of recently arrived artists were imposed over the culture, experiences and stories of First Nations peoples, whose deep connections to Country were disregarded.

She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism examines the multiple facets of Impressionism in Australia, from artists painting en plein air at Eaglemont and the groundbreaking 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition, to those working in Europe at the turn of the century, inspired by James McNeill Whistler and Claude Monet. The exhibition includes major works drawn from public and private collections around Australia, including the NGV Collection.

New insight into this movement can be gained by examining the friendships, professional relationships and career-shaping moments of its most celebrated artists, including Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder, Frederick McCubbin, Clara Southern, E. Phillips Fox, Jane Sutherland, John Russell, Ethel Carrick and many others. Important works by lesser-known artists including Ina Gregory and May Vale are also brought to light.

She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism is guest curated by Dr Anne Gray AM with the NGV Australian Art department. The NGV is grateful to the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia and the many other lenders for their generosity and breadth of loans to this exhibition.

‘Roberts and I had an immense reverence for the work [Buvelot] did… most of us owe it to him that slowly we were able to see… the exquisite beauty of our lovely skies – the glorious colour and form of our gum trees… the beauty and warmth of our native land.’
FREDERICK McCUBBIN, AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REMINISCENCES

Between the 1860s and 1880s, artists who had trained and worked in Europe brought their experience of international art to Australia, including ideas about sketching outdoors.
These artists made an important contribution to the development of Impressionism in Australia.

Louis Buvelot studied in Switzerland and Paris before arriving in Australia in 1865. Through his work and teaching, with a focus on ‘light and tone’ and the poetry of quiet places, he influenced the development of plein air (open air) painting in Australia. Scottish-born John Mather was another pioneer of this approach, capturing the vibrant contrasts of land and sea. Portuguese artist Artur Loureiro combined the new practice of painting outdoors with a Romantic reverence for nature.

The emergence of new technology also impacted upon Impressionism’s development, internationally and in Australia, with photography introducing new types of composition, and capacity to capture the changing pace of modern life.

The friendships of the artists known as the Australian Impressionists, principally those between Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder, were formed in youth and continued throughout their lives. These artists had many experiences in common, but by no means all. They also had other friends. On occasion they were rivals.

At times, this group of artists has been referred to as the Heidelberg School, but they are more accurately described as a group of friends and associates, painting together at various times and in various places. While artists such as Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Jane Sutherland and Louis Abrahams, met while studying at the National Gallery School, others, such as Tom Roberts and John Russell, were introduced while travelling in
Europe. Some spent their summers painting on Sydney waterfronts, while others remained in Victoria, continuing their education at Charterisville, in Eaglemont. There were occasional disagreements between various pairs; however, the encouragement they gave one another was critical in their artistic development.

Although they did not practise as a unified movement, these artists were connected by a sense of creative innovation, the desire to record their environment in new ways, and capture the fleeting moments of modern
Australian life.

A period of European study was instrumental in the creative development of several artists associated with Impressionism in Australia. In encountering the work of European Impressionists, they drew inspiration from the same subjects, and expanded their technical abilities and creative frames of reference. Tom Roberts lived in London from 1881 to 1885, studying at the Royal Academy Schools, and travelling more widely in Europe, sometimes accompanied by other artists. His experiences overseas, and his enthusiasm for what he saw, had a profound influence on his own work and on the development of Impressionism in Australia.

Back in Melbourne, the 1880s saw a major economic boom, which led to an increased sense of national identity, and a flourishing of art and culture. Between 1881 and 1891, Melbourne’s population almost doubled, and the economy was boosted by trade. Inspired by the city’s energy and optimism during his visit in 1885, the English journalist, George Sala, christened it ‘Marvellous Melbourne’.

‘Nature under our Australian sky seems to me like a shy reserved person, ready to repel you but you have only to wait and watch her varying moods and you will find all the beauty you can desire.’
FREDERICK McCUBBIN, THE AGE, MELBOURNE, 10 FEBRUARY 1894

In 1885, Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Louis Abrahams established an artists’ camp on a patch of wild bush at Box Hill. While the site was on Melbourne’s outskirts, it was by then readily accessible by train. Jane Sutherland made day trips to the camp. Strict Victorian codes of propriety prevented women from remaining at the camps overnight.

Painting outdoors and focusing on small segments of the bush, Roberts and McCubbin created works with no obvious horizon line that were radically different from the wide panoramic viewpoints of earlier Australian landscape painters, who were mostly European born.

In the summer of 1886–87, McCubbin, Roberts and Abrahams rented a cottage in the beachside suburb of Mentone. They painted outdoors, producing the first works in which Australian recreation at the beach was represented authoritatively in oil paint. Beach gatherings, with a breezy outdoor feeling, had also been popular with French Impressionist artists. At Ricketts Point, the three artists came across nineteen year-old Arthur Streeton sketching, and invited him to paint with them at Mentone and at Box Hill.

‘Conder’s taste was unerring with regard to colour harmony and fanciful, if somewhat artificial, sense of design.’
JULIAN ASHTON, ‘SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF CHARLES CONDER’, ART AND AUSTRALIA, 1917

English-born Charles Conder arrived in Sydney on 13 June 1884, where he found a lively artistic community. He attended the Art Society of New South Wales’s Saturday afternoon classes under A. J. Daplyn (an advocate of plein-air painting), and participated in the
meetings of Julian Ashton’s Sydney Sketch Club with artists including A. Henry Fullwood and Girolamo Nerli.

In November–December 1887, Conder met Tom Roberts, who was visiting Sydney, and in 1888, the two painted together outdoors at the popular Coogee Bay. In Sydney, Roberts continued his friendship with portrait photographer H. Walter Barnett, whom he had first met in 1877 when both worked at Stewart & Co. photographic studios, Melbourne. Barnett purchased Roberts’s Holiday sketch at Coogee, 1888. While in Sydney, Roberts may also have encountered the landscape and panorama photographer Charles Bayliss.

Painting alongside Ashton, Fullwood and others in July–August 1888, Conder spent a fortnight at Griffith’s Farm, Richmond. He moved to Melbourne in October 1888, to join Roberts and friends.

‘The enjoyment of “The last summer at Eaglemont” was to me more intense than anything I have up to the present felt… Its suggestion is a large harmony. Musical, rosy.’
ARTHUR STREETON, LETTER TO TOM ROBERTS, 20 SEPTEMBER 1890

Towards the end of 1888, Streeton went to Heidelberg to visit the site of Louis Buvelot’s Summer afternoon, Templestowe, 1866. On his return to the railway station, he was offered the use of an old weatherboard farmhouse on the Mount Eagle estate (now part of the Melbourne suburb of Eaglemont).

Streeton spent his first night there in December 1888, sleeping on the floor with his boots and coat for a pillow. Conder and Roberts joined him early in 1889 and the artists spent two idyllic summers there. In The Argus on 16 October 1934 Streeton recalled: ‘Our beds were made of cornsacks nailed to two saplings, and supported by upright pieces to raise them from the floor. Our seats were old boxes, our dining table was a box with boards placed across it. Our [food was]… cooked together in a large
pail. Our illumination was tallow candles’.

The three artists were sometimes joined by others, including Jane Sutherland and Jane Price, who made regular day trips.

The 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition opened on 17 August 1889 at Buxton’s Art Gallery, Swanston
Street, Melbourne. Tom Roberts was the chief instigator.
He, Charles Conder and Arthur Streeton contributed the
majority of the paintings.

The artists sought to convey momentary impressions of colour, light and the transient moods of nature. They explained their interests in the catalogue: ‘An effect is only
momentary; so an impressionist tries to find his place. Two half hours are never alike… So in these works, it has been the object of the artist to render faithfully, and thus
obtain first records of effects widely differing, and often of very fleeting character’.

They claimed that their rapid ‘impressions’ were complete, independent pictures, and sought to free themselves from traditional attitudes about what could be considered a ‘finished’ work of art.

The exhibition’s title referred to the dimensions of the wooden panels on which several of the works were painted – nine by five inches (23 x 12.5 cm). Many of these were cedar cigar-box lids.

The decor was described as ‘Japanese’, and some reviewers of the exhibition also noted that the small panels were in the manner of James McNeill Whistler’s poetic landscapes. Music was supplied by an American organ belonging to Tom Roberts, brought in from his studio nearby.

The studios at Grosvenor Chambers at 9 Collins Street, Melbourne, were built expressly for artists. Roberts moved into his suite on the top (second) floor in April 1888. It included a small print room, which was occupied by Conder between October 1888 and February 1889, and then by Jane Price. The first floor was occupied by Kate Eeles, a couturier, and the ground floor by Jane Sutherland and Clara Southern. Percival Ball, a sculptor, worked in the basement.

Roberts decorated his studio in the Aesthetic manner, and with an Orientalist tendency, including art and artefacts from China and Japan as well as European designs inspired by an imagined vision of ‘the East’. In June 1888, he instigated a series of conversaziones – social meetings for conversation about art and literature – that brought together fellow artists at Roberts’s studio to discuss the latest art journals to arrive in Melbourne. He
owned an American cabinet organ, which he and Streeton played while McCubbin sang fragments of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.

From 1889, Roberts held ‘studio days’, at which he exhibited his own paintings, as well as those of friends. In the first half of 1891, while Roberts was away in New South Wales, Streeton and John Mather took over Roberts’s studio.

‘Roberts & I go to Mossman’s Bay & pull through the lazy green water… The little Bay seemed all asleep & so very peaceful… Warm balmy air blue orchids & the purple glory of sarsaparilla.’
ARTHUR STREETON, LETTER TO THEODORE FINK, 1891

With Melbourne falling into economic depression, Roberts and Streeton moved from the city to Sydney in September 1891, optimistic about better prospects. Initially, Streeton remained in New South Wales for only four months, rejoining Roberts in Sydney in December 1892.

In Sydney they lived at Curlew Camp, an artists’ base established by entrepreneur Reuben Brasch at Sirius Cove. It was just around the point from the Mosman ferry, allowing easy access to the city, where Roberts and Streeton also worked in a shared studio.

During the 1890s Roberts became one of Sydney’s most fashionable portrait painters. His portraits included a series of twenty-three portraits, Familiar Faces and Figures, which depict prominent personalities from the arts and politics.

Streeton painted Sydney city life, demonstrating his fascination with modern subjects, such as busy street scenes and trains. He also adopted a painting format of long panels, in which he captured the sparkling beauty of Sydney Harbour and its light, energy and colour.

From 1890 until 1893, Walter Withers rented the run-down homestead, Charterisville, where he had a studio, and sublet one-roomed cottages to other artists. Charterisville was situated on rising land above the Yarra in East Ivanhoe, and had a large, unkempt garden. In 1890, Leon Pole joined Withers there and remained for several years.

Between 1893 and 1901, E. Phillips Fox ran the Melbourne School of Art with fellow painter Tudor St George Tucker. They used colour boldly, adopting a ‘broken brush’ technique that employed a round brush, in the manner of the French Impressionists. In 1893 they took over the lease of Charterisville and conducted a summer school there, attended by Ina Gregory, Mary Meyer and Helen Peters. Violet Teague was also there, possibly as a tutor. Clara Southern spent most of her working life painting at Warrandyte, depicting bush scenes in soft, muted tones.

As the century drew to a close, the Symbolist movement prompted a new fascination with mythology, imagination and dreams, and under its influence landscape painting took on a more contemplative air. Artists such as Withers, Pole, Jane Sutherland, David Davies, Artur Loureiro and Clara Southern worked in outer Melbourne, painting wistful, mysterious landscapes.

‘Harmonies in grey and yellow, arrangements in orange blue and white, and symphonies in rose, black and grey, after the manner of Mr James Whistler, the first of the English Impressionists.’
EDITH CASTILLA, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, 17 AUGUST 1889

Whistler’s carefully stage-managed exhibitions were a source of inspiration for the display, planning and marketing of the 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition. The Australian artists followed Whistler’s example, with many works painted in closely related tones and titled accordingly, unconventionally framed and massed together on display.

The National Gallery of Victoria had purchased the sixteen etchings of Whistler’s Thames Set in 1892, and in 1898–99 the Art Gallery of New South Wales purchased seven of Whistler’s etchings. Roberts, Streeton and Fox would have viewed at least some of these.

In 1905, about 750 of Whistler’s works were shown in a memorial exhibition in London, two years after the artist’s death. Living in London, with their memory of Whistler’s work refreshed, some Australian artists began to paint works reflecting their revived interest. Like Whistler, they used a subdued palette to depict mists and fog on the Thames.

Australian-born Mortimer Menpes was taught etching by Whistler and became his disciple, printing many impressions of his etchings.

‘I only wish you could have seen some of his [Monet’s] landscapes; they lived.’
CHARLES CONDER, LETTER TO TOM ROBERTS, MAY 1891

John Russell met Claude Monet in the summer of 1886 during a visit to Belle Île, off the coast of Brittany, and invited him home to dinner. In return, Monet allowed Russell to watch him work, and the pair talked about art for ten days. This was a turning point for Russell, and he started to apply his paint with rapid strokes of pure, highkey colour.

E. Phillips Fox called on Russell in October 1887 and they discussed what Russell had learnt from Monet. The tranquil, luminous portraits of young local women that Fox and Tudor St George Tucker painted in the late 1880s and 1890s bear the marks of a revolutionary new approach to colour and light.

In 1905, British artist Ethel Carrick moved to France, where she developed her distinctive light-filled palette and loose brushwork. There, she and her husband, Fox, visited Étaples in northern France, and probably met with Fox’s former National Gallery School associate, Iso Rae.

Charles Conder, also working in Europe, admired Monet’s work and visited some of his favourite sites, such as Vétheuil and Giverny. In May 1891, Conder viewed fifteen of Monet’s haystack paintings on display at the Galerie Durand Ruel, Paris.

In the 1880s and 1890s, Frederick McCubbin, Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton sought to convey narratives of Australian life, as they experienced it. They produced popular, dramatic images on a grand scale, with each artist creating their images in a different way.

While McCubbin painted haunting and mysterious depictions of the bush, Roberts favoured scenes of action – workers in a shearing shed, or the sudden stillness of a ‘hold up’. Streeton explored the visual dynamism caused by an explosion, and its aftermath of human tragedy.

These artists’ visions of Australia differed from those of earlier settlers. McCubbin’s rendering of the texture of Australian vegetation was unlike colonial portrayals of the landscape, as was Roberts’s and Streeton’s treatment of the country’s intense summer heat. Drawing upon diverse artistic exemplars, from contemporary photography, to French nineteenth-century realist or naturalist painting, to the awe of the Sublime, they forged a distinct and powerful mode of narrative painting.

‘You got to know your father’s country: Yarra is my Father’s Country. Me no leave it.’
WILLIAM BARAK, c. 1824–1903

The stylistic innovation associated with Australian Impressionism has often led to the positioning of the movement as ‘Australia’s first school of art’. However, it exists within a far longer history. The thriving art traditions of Australia’s First Peoples, custodians of the longest continuing culture on Earth, have existed for 65,000 years.

The Australian Impressionists sought to forge a connection with a place in which they had only recently arrived. At the same time, First Peoples in south-eastern Australia – where the Australian Impressionists were working – continued to make art enriched by their innate connection to and knowledge of Country. Viewed side by side, their work is testament to the complex, challenging, and often tragic relationship between art and identity in Australia.