The Golden Hour

Exclusive to Gippsland Art Gallery, The Golden Hour: Australian Impressionism—Origins, Icons & Echoes explores the celebrated myths and personalities behind the formative period in Australia art that has in many ways come to define the way our nation sees itself. A landmark exhibition for Gippsland Art Gallery, The Golden Hour celebrates the classics, sparkling nostalgic memories, stories and Australiana themes of country, landscape and character.

The exhibition brings together major artworks from the celebrated ‘Heidelberg School’ period of Australian painting (c.1880–1900), including iconic works by Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin and Charles Conder, such as Roberts’ Shearing the Rams (1890) and twelve works from the infamous 9×5 Impression Exhibition of 1889.

The Golden Hour also explores the influences and aftereffects of this revolutionary period by presenting key works from the two decades before (1860–1880) and the two decades after (1900–1920), offering a rare continuum of Australian landscape painting across six decades of transformation. The exhibition charts the changes in fortunes through the boom years of the 1880s and the bust of the 1890s, and the ways in which art gauged national character and how we saw ourselves as a nation.

Significantly, The Golden Hour also connects this historical legacy to contemporary practice through works by Mary Tonkin and Michelle Hiscock, demonstrating the enduring influence of light, atmosphere, and landscape in Australian art today.

The Golden Hour is organised by Gippsland Art Gallery in partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria.

The NGV sincerely thanks AWM Electrical for their incredible support towards numerous Australian galleries, and we warmly acknowledge their outstanding leadership in enhancing Australia’s cultural landscape.