Not As The Songs of Other Lands: 19th Century Australian and American Landscape Painting

NOT AS THE S ON GS O F OTHER LANDS 19th Century Australian and American Landscape Painting

Charles Troedel (lithographer) Nicholas Chevalier (artist) Parker’s River waterfall, Cape Otway (detail) 1865 chromolithograph The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 Cover Robert Havell Jnr (etcher) Robert Dale (artist) Panoramic view of King George’s Sound, part of the Colony of Swan River (detail) 1834 etching, aquatint and watercolour on three sheets The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973

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Not as the songs of other lands Her song shall be Where dim Her purple shore-line stands Above the sea!

As erst she stood, she stands alone; Her inspiration is her own.

From sunlit plains to mangrove strands Not as the songs of other lands Her song shall be.

An Australian Symphony George Essex Evans

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N OT A S T HE SO N G S OF OTHE R LA NDS 19th Century Australian and American Landscape Painting

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Pages 2–3 John Glover Patterdale farm (detail) c. 1840 oil on canvas Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales Purchased 1974 Page 4 Thomas Doughty In the Adirondacks c. 1822–1830 oil on canvas Terra Foundation for American Art, Gift of Laurence and Ronnie Robbins Pages 6–7 Martin Johnson Heade Newburyport Marshes: approaching storm (detail) c. 1871 oil on canvas Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection Pages 8–9 Robert Havell and Son (engraver) James Taylor (artist) The town of Sydney in New South Wales Published by Colnaghi & Co., London aquatint, engraving and watercolour The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973

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CONTENTS

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Foreword Kelly Gellatly

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A Civilised People?

Landscape, Art and National Identity in the Nineteenth Century Dr Meighen Katz

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List of works in the exhibition

John Glover A corroboree of natives in Mills Plains 1832 oil on canvas Morgan Thomas Bequest Fund 1951 Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

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Pages 12–13 Walter Preston (etcher) John Eyre (artist) Botany Bay Harbour in New South Wales: with view of the Heads. Taken from Cook’s Point (detail) 1812 Published by Absalom West, Sydney etching The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 Page 14 Thomas Woolnoth (engraver) William Westall (artist) (Untitled) View of the north side of Kangaroo Island c. 1814 etching and engraving The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973

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FOREWORD

An Australian Symphony Not as the songs of other lands Her song shall be Where dim Her purple shore-line stands Above the sea!

As erst she stood, she stands alone; Her inspiration is her own.

From sunlit plains to mangrove strands Not as the songs of the other lands Her song shall be.1

Published shortly after the Federation of Australia in 1901, George Essex Evans’ poem An Australian Symphony, from which the title of this exhibition derives, articulates a sense of pride in the independence of a new nation through an emotive evocation of the diverse natural environment of the vast Australian continent, but equally conveys the anxieties that remain around its differences from the mother country and the perceived challenges of this ‘new’ and seemingly strange land. That these anxieties persist for Essex Evans some 100+ years after the moment of first contact, and the resulting and ongoing impacts of colonisation is telling, as is the fact that the ‘Australia’ the poem evokes no doubt continues to resonate for many of the nation’s citizens today.

In bringing together landscape works from the collections of the Terra Foundation for American Art in Chicago, the Russell and Mab Grimwade ‘Miegunyah’ Collection from the University of Melbourne, and significant Australian paintings from national and state collections, Not As The Songs of Other Lands explores the political, economic and cultural aspirations revealed by artistic representations of the land in Australian and American art during the nineteenth century.

By comparing and contrasting Australian and American approaches by some of the most celebrated nineteenth-century artists of both

countries, Not As The Songs of Other Lands reveals some of the influences underpinning the shared desire for territorial expansion and subsequent ‘taming’ of the land; the rise of urban development, and the pursuit of leisure within these two very different nations. To twenty-first century eyes however, these works also reflect the uncomfortable and troubling characteristics of nineteenth-century colonial ideology and exploration through their depiction of race, class and power. We have no doubt that the display of these magnificent works and the dialogue created between them will resonate for contemporary audiences, and that both the works themselves and the issues that they continue to raise, will generate meaningful discussion and debate.

In many ways, the University of Melbourne’s Grimwade Collection and the collection of the Terra Foundation for American Art have evolved from similar conceptual origins. Each collection began as a personal rather than institutional undertaking and quest, and their individual development was each framed and informed by their respective founders’ interest in notions of national history and identity, and the ability of works of art to function as informative and powerful expressions of both.

Within the Australian context, Sir Russell Grimwade (1879–1955) was a man of wide-ranging interests, encompassing industry, science and art. As a result, the Grimwade Collection provides a perspective on the visual history of Australia from the time of European colonisation to the 1950s, with dominant themes reflecting Sir Russell’s desire to document the exploration, settlement and development of Australia as a nation, and the growth of Melbourne, his home, as a city. Similarly, Daniel J. Terra’s (1911– 1996) role as a businessman and United States Ambassador-at-Large for Cultural Affairs informed the direction of his own collecting, as did his desire to share the historical art of the United States with people around the world through his establishment of the Terra Foundation in 1978; the Terra Museum of American Art in 1980 (which closed in 2004, to better enable the work of the Foundation), and the opening of the Terra Musée d’Art Américain Giverny (1992–2008), which since 2009 operates as the

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Musée des Impressionismes Giverny, a museum of international impressionism. Ambassador Terra’s ambitions for the continued scholarship around and enjoyment of American Art from 1500 to 1980, lives on in the work of the Foundation today, and for their support of and collaboration with the Potter on this exhibition we are immensely grateful.

Not As The Songs of Other Lands has, at its heart, a strong educational rationale. The Terra Foundation paintings in the exhibition first travelled to Australia and were seen in Perth in the Art Gallery of Western Australia’s exhibition Continental Shift (30 July 2016 to 5 February 2017), where they were paired with works from the Gallery’s collection. This second exhibition iteration at the Potter presents an entirely new curatorial framework and explores the conversations that can emerge from the Terra works being brought into contact with a group of very different collection objects. The exhibition has also been designed to enrich the University of Melbourne’s curriculum through close connections with course content across a number of faculties and departments, including Art History, Literature, History, Human Geography and Indigenous Studies.

The stories of dispossession, displacement and indeed, genocide of indigenous peoples that serve as the largely absent backdrop to the works within the exhibition will be further investigated by the presence and involvement of Mohawk artist and activist Alan Michelson, who will travel to Melbourne as the University’s Macgeorge Fellow in April, as well as a three-day intervention, within the gallery space, of Indigenous artist Richard Bell’s Embassy; which functions as both a restaging of and homage to the original Aboriginal Tent Embassy, first assembled by activists on the lawn of Parliament House, Canberra in 1972, and now recognised as the world’s longest-running protest. By serving as a platform for a series of presentations, discussions, screenings and performances (in which Michelson will also be involved), Embassy both reflects on this pivotal historical moment in the Indigenous land rights movement, while revealing the continuing struggle for self-determination for First Nations peoples within Australia and internationally.

We are delighted to collaborate with the Terra Foundation for American Art on this project and thank the Foundation’s Chair, Mimi Gardner Gates and President and Chief Executive Officer Elizabeth Glassman for their very generous support. Special thanks are also due to Terra Foundation Curator Peter John (PJ) Brownlee, who has guided the project with expertise, and with a sense of generosity and good will, and to Registrar Cathy Ricciardelli.

I congratulate the Potter’s inaugural Grimwade Collection Curator Dr Meighen Katz for her work on the exhibition and this beautiful publication and also thank and acknowledge Samantha Comte, the Potter’s Curator/Exhibitions Coordinator, Jacqueline Doughty, Curatorial Manager, Alyce Neal, Assistant Curator and Steve Martin, Collections Officer – Exhibitions and Loans for their significant contribution to the exhibition’s success. Finally, I warmly thank our colleagues at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide and The Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria for the loan of major works from their collections.

Not As The Songs of Other Lands and this publication would not have been possible without the generous support of the University of Melbourne’s Russell and Mab Grimwade ‘Miegunyah’ Fund.

Kelly Gellatly Director, Ian Potter Museum of Art

1. Evans, G.E “An Australian Symphony” in The secret key and other verses, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1906, pp.3–7

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Nicholas Chevalier Studley Park at sunrise (detail) 1861 oil on canvas Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Gift of Mrs Dorothy Gurner 1959

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John Frederick Kensett Almy Pond, Newport c. 1857 oil on canvas Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

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Pages 22–23 Philip Slaeger (etcher) John Eyre (artist) View of part of the town of Parramatta in New South Wales. Taken from the north side of the river 1812 Published by Absalom West, Sydney etching The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 Pages 24–25 Sanford Robinson Gifford Hunter Mountain, twilight 1866 oil on canvas Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection Page 26 Fitz Henry Lane Brace’s Rock, Brace’s Cove 1864 oil on canvas Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection Page 28 Eugene von Guérard Castle Rock, Cape Schanck 1865 oil on canvas M.J.M Carter AO Collection through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 1992 Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

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A CIVILISED PEOPLE? Landscape, Art and National Identity in the Nineteenth Century

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In his foreword to a 1954 volume celebrating the centennial of the National Museum of Victoria (now Museum Victoria), Sir Russell Grimwade proposed: There are both duties and obligations upon those of a civilised people who, for their own or their country’s advantage, enter a strange and almost empty land.1 While this position relies on the now-rejected notion of Terra Nullius, it remains revelatory. A product of a nineteenth century education, Sir Russell’s statement echoes a commonly held historical view of land, landscape and the role of civilisation in relation to physical place. To proponents of this view, there was an obligation to reshape the strange into the familiar, to make land useful, and to make it serve broader goals: economic, philosophical and especially national or imperial.

The exhibition Not As the Songs of Other Lands explores this interplay of national identity, national narrative and visual culture. It draws together nineteenth century landscapes from the Russell and Mab Grimwade ‘Miegunyah’ Collection at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Hudson River School paintings from the Terra Foundation for American Art and paintings from the Australian collections at the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Art Gallery of Ballarat and the Art Gallery of South Australia. These images reflect the ideological influences at play within American and Australian societies at the time, including those surrounding territorial expansion, scientific and technological knowledge, urban development, leisure and the futures of indigenous populations.

Landscape art, as a genre, is particularly cogent in understanding the national narratives of Americans and Australians. Both are national psyches constructed around broad vistas, real and perceived, and around open spaces seemingly empty of inhabitants but full of potential and threat in equal measure. Land in these young societies could be a source of freedom, rendering old world structures of political participation and advancement obsolete. At the same time, it was oppressive in its silences, daunting in its size, unforgiving in its climate and its conditions. The negotiation with the environment captured in ink and paint represents struggles faced by the United States and the Australian colonies as they sought to solidify their respective places in the wider world.

On both continents, the relationship to land remained an unsettled paradigm during the nineteenth century.

The Americans found that creating a united people was much harder than the acquisition of the land on which they would build their nation. Even as Americans pushed west, deep divisions festered between the northern and southern states. The original thirteen colonies were disparate in their origins, ideologies and populations. As their territory stretched out across the continent, these differences became increasingly pronounced and the source of tension and conflict.

Thus if Americans saw themselves in the landscapes that surrounded them, the reflection was never entirely clear and their expectations for the land and its cultural depictions made contradictory demands. The land was to be at once wild and civilised, rough but not savage, unique but of beauty equal to any European vista.

While the Americans had fought a war to secede from Britain, the separation faced by their Australian counterparts derived less from choice and more from the oppressive distances between the old world and new, and from the stigma associated with the punitive transportation of convicts. Those in the Australian colonies often sought to echo the visual geography of the place they had left in that of their arrival. They struggled, seemingly in contradiction to obvious limitations, to recreate the European environment in a new land that was unrelentingly resistant to such efforts.

As much as these images provide rich, complex narratives, a great deal has been omitted. Slavery is absent from the American narrative, as is immigration, while the more brutal aspects of the Australian convict system similarly fade into the background. The inherent violence in the acquisition of land from indigenous peoples is masked by misleading visual language of the passive ‘noble savage’ witnessing and accepting the inevitability of European possession. The cultures that created this art were imperfect and unfinished, so too then are the narratives and images that surround their histories.

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Alfred Thompson Bricher Lake George from Bolton’s Landing 1867 oil on canvas Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

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CIVILISED AND SAVAGE: AMERICAN LANDSCAPE

The American nineteenth century began with one of the largest land acquisitions in modern history.

Recognising the strategic and economic importance of the Mississippi River, President Thomas Jefferson sent his agents to Paris to secure access to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. They encountered a French Empire in need of monies to fight wars closer to home and a willingness to divest themselves of holdings on the American continent in order to do so.2 Jefferson’s men returned to Washington with a land package that drew American holdings fully across the continent to dip its outstretched fingers into the Pacific Ocean. America now owned the makings of an internal empire with all the mixed blessings that entailed. The Louisiana Purchase took the concept of the frontier, once applied to the mountainous regions that hugged the eastern fringes of the nation and flung it far over the horizon. In the forests, mountains, and river basins between the shining coasts lay the wealth of kings in arable land, grasslands for stock, timber, and mining.

In time, westward expansion would not only excite Americans already standing on the established shores, it would draw immigrants across the seas. In Britain and Europe private lands were heavily entailed and the commons were increasingly subject to enclosure, but there was land to be had in America. Not everyone sought to gain a foothold in the western territories, indeed industrialisation had begun the slow drag of Americans into the cities and manufacturing towns of the northeast. The physical land was enticing though daunting, but its potential was the stuff of which dreams were made. These dreamers were seemingly untroubled by the realities of their expansionist aspirations and the dreadful impacts they would have upon the Native American tribes who inhabited the land and drew their livelihoods and their way of life from it. The seeds of ‘manifest destiny’ had been sown. The Louisiana Purchase not only defined borders it created a new imagining, a new sense of self that was made larger by the idea of a distant yet reachable frontier.

Though never a formal self-identifying cohort, the label of the Hudson River School is loosely applied to the group of American nineteenth century landscape artists who worked primarily in New York and New England, travelling and sketching in the warmer months, and then transferring their views to oil and

canvas once back in the studio.3 Taking their lead from Thomas Cole, visually, the Hudson River School artists were interested in the interplay of light and land and water. It is their engagement with a philosophical, nationalist approach to the landscape, however, that especially characterises these artists.4 Cole, as revealed through his 1836 Essay On American Scenery, consciously sought an aesthetic that united ideals regarding American citizenship, the American landscape and American art all in counterpoint to European models.5 Their work paralleled that of transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in creating a vision of a “redemptive national landscape”.6 Thus there is, at times, a complex philosophy underpinning their images. John La Farge’s Paradise Valley c.1866–1868 p.74 constructed around theologic imagery, serves as case in point. Yet there are contradictions present.

Works by Hudson River School artists also reflect the influence of the middle-distance landscapes of French artist Claude Lorrain and the compositional transition from wilderness, order and civilization.7 For all that they may privilege the natural world, it is frequently a natural world shaped and steered by the hand of white men.

Perhaps no paintings within the exhibition better encapsulate the contradictory expectations placed on American lands than the renditions of Lake George, New York. Lake George was one of several early tourist sites in New York, along with the Catskill Mountain House and Niagara Falls. At these sites, those with the requisite funds could experience nature in all her rugged beauty without forgoing the comforts of civilisation and with relative ease of access from the metropolitan centres of New York, Boston and Philadelphia.8 The combination of natural beauty and accessibility made Lake George a popular subject for artists. Amongst the artists featured within this exhibition, Thomas Cole, Alfred Thompson Bricher, John Frederick Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade, Thomas Doughty, Worthington Whittredge and Sanford Robinson Gifford all painted the lake and its surrounds. Bricher’s Lake George from Bolton’s Landing 1867 p.32 is typical of the Lake George canon, emphasising the lake’s role as a site of tourism and leisure. Thomas Cole painted several views of the lake, but Landscape with figures: A scene from “The Last of the Mohicans” 1826 pp.66–67 is a

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Thomas Cole Landscape with figures: A scene from “The Last of the Mohicans” (detail) 1826 oil on panel Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

commissioned piece featuring a climactic scene from James Fennimore Cooper’s popular novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826). Taken together, the paintings amplify some of the common undercurrents of the collected works within the exhibition, particularly the tensions between indigenous and settler societies and the perceived dichotomy of savage versus civilised.

Though painted in 1826, Cole’s painting is set, by way of Cooper’s novel, in 1757. At that time, New York was a North American theatre of the Seven Years War, fought between the British and the Bourbon Empires. Within the local conflict, Native American tribes were drawn in by alliances—the Hurons aligned with the French, the Iroquois with the British. The painting shows the death of Cora at the hands of a Huron warrior, Magua. She lies at his feet, while Uncas, the eponymous last of the Mohican tribe prepares to avenge her. In the distant background, Fort William Henry burns, referencing a massacre of surrendered British soldiers and civilians at the hands of the Hurons during the war. The mountains through which these

characters walk are dangerous, still fought over by indigenous warriors to the peril of white women.

While the light on the far horizon gives some sense of hope, the fires of Fort William Henry suggest that the foothold of civilisation is not yet assured.

In contrast, Bricher’s version of the region, painted in 1867, is light and airy. In the intervening century, the landscape has been cleared and fenced, tamed. The smoke in the middle-distance is not that of a building alight, torched and destroyed, but rather emanates from the town suggesting a welcoming hearth or a train passing through, and indicating civilisation well entrenched. The figures are similarly representative of an environmental shift. In Landscape with figures, the land is still the domain of the Native Americans and even the ‘good’ Native American, Uncas, is a man of war. These men are absent from Lake George from Bolton’s Landing, forced ever westward and rendered invisible. Meanwhile, in contrast to Cole’s depiction, Bricher’s women have no fear for their lives or their persons. They take their leisure in nature without a

chaperone. A letter to Harper’s Weekly in 1857 on the perils faced by a woman traveller complains of the seeming battle between terrain and fashion, rather than dangers posed by threatening inhabitants.9 Thus the two paintings together encapsulate the nineteenth century view of improvement; as enticing as frontier lands might be, realisation of their full potential was dependent on that land being shaped by the hands of white men. If Landscape with figures is the vision of nature ‘before’ intervention, then Lake George from Bolton’s Landing becomes the idealised finished landscape, one that offers the restorative powers of interaction with the natural world in a safe contained and ordered space. It epitomises Claude Lorrain’s vision of landscape transferred to an American theatre.

Though the American painters embraced Edmund Burke’s version of the masculine sublime, one which celebrated a beauty full of power, the key element of the sublime—that the danger is viewed from a place apart, and one of relative safety—was also quintessential to their landscape.10 The environment might be redemptive in its ruggedness, but it was never

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Alfred Thompson Bricher The Sidewheeler “The City of St. Paul” on the Mississippi River, Dubuque Iowa 1872 oil on canvas mounted on board Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

allowed to remain completely wild. Alfred Thompson Bricher’s The Sidewheeler “The City of St Paul” on the Mississippi River, Dubuque Iowa 1872 (above) serves a similar purpose, celebrating the freedom and the potential of the frontier even while restricting it. Rivers were central to American economic growth in the nineteenth century. The Louisiana purchase and the subsequent explorations of Lewis and Clark were all motivated by rivers both real and hoped for.11 Fast moving water to drive mills created factory towns and subsequent wealth in areas where the land had proved ill-suited to extensive farming. At a time when roads were rough and railroads rudimentary, the river systems allowed goods to be moved from inland settlements out to ports on the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. The Hudson River epitomised this water-borne network. The 1825 completion of the Erie Canal linked Lake Erie to the Hudson, and the agriculture of Ohio to New York Harbour. The Hudson was also the setting for the advent of steamboats, when Robert Fulton’s Clermont took its first run up river in 1807.12 No river is more central to the

American imagination, however, than the Mississippi River. The ‘Mighty Mississippi’ serves as both a physical East/West divide for the continent and, thanks largely to Mark Twain, as a waterway of mythic proportions.

The Sidewheeler (and to a lesser extent Fitz Henry Lane’s Gloucester Harbour 1856) pp.36–37 is somewhat atypical among the Hudson River School paintings in its depiction of commerce. Much of the work of the Hudson artists, particularly the commissioned paintings, pushes the indicators of economic pursuit to the background and emphasises the depiction of nature.13 While The Sidewheeler highlights the wide expanses of river, almost lakelike in their breadth set against the open sky, it also foregrounds the industrial and commercial elements within this western vista. But while Bricher’s depiction of ‘The City of St Paul’ may invoke remembrances of Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1883) it also stands in counterpoint to other representations of life on the river.

George Caleb Bingham’s paintings of those working afloat regularly feature river men in harmony with the water, allowing themselves to be carried by the flow of the river.14 While all have oars and paddles with which to move against the current, more often than not, they drift, unresisting.15 The paddlewheelers are the symbols of men who chart their own course, rather than being carried where the water takes them.

Their steam-engines and wheels drive their boats upstream against the flow, industry and engineering enabling commerce to move efficiently in spite of nature even whilst immersed within it. Thus Bricher celebrates the power of the Mississippi River, but in doing so, he simultaneously recognises the ability to tame it, to stand in resistance through the use of machinery. Much like Lake George from Bolton’s Landing, the painting of the sidewheeler celebrates a version of the natural world that has been brought into compliance and order by the knowledge and ingenuity of men.

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Fitz Henry Lane Gloucester Harbour 1856 oil on canvas Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

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ALIEN AND FAMILIAR: AUSTRALIAN LANDSCAPES

Desire for order and demonstrations of civilisation are even more pronounced in nineteenth century Australian visual culture. The land that greeted the early Europeans was an alien one, often regarded as malevolent. The late eighteenth century exploratory reports from naval captain James Cook and naturalist Joseph Banks as to the suitability of the southern continent for habitation had implied, at the very least, potential. Banks stated: “New Holland tho’ in every respect the most barren countrey I have seen, is not so bad but that between the productions of sea and Land a company of People who should have the misfortune of being shipwreck’d upon it might support themselves”.16 As the early fleets landed upon its shores, it became apparent that even Banks’ faint praise may have been overstated. Convict and artist, Thomas Watling wrote to his aunt in Dumfries, Scotland in 1791: The face of the country is deceitful; having every appearance of fertility; and yet productive of no one article in itself fit for the support of mankind.17 And while Watling saw much beauty and wonder in his surrounds, he stressed their strangeness to the Britons and expressed a homesickness for his native land.18 The foreground of Philip (Sligo) Slaeger and Absalom West’s print A View of the town of Windsor, in New South Wales taken from the banks of the River Hawkesbury 4 June 1813 1813 p.39 hints at the colonists’ initial reactions to the native flora.

The plants are monstrous and stand in counterpoint to the ordered English-style garden of John Glover’s paintings or even the wild yet manageable flowering plants of the English countryside. As the colonists and convicts came to terms with their new environment it seemed that everything was inverted, not just the seasons. Watling observed that the birds and animals were active in darkness and silent during the day. The early colonists developed the habit of firing weapons simply to create noise within the bush, breaking up the unending, oppressive silence that enfolded them.19 The notion of order from chaos, underpinned the Australian colony from its earliest days. In mid-1788, some six months after the founding of the settlement Governor Phillip observed:

There are few things more pleasing than the contemplation of order and useful arrangement, arising gradually out of tumult and confusion; and perhaps this satisfaction cannot any where be more fully enjoyed than where a settlement of civilised people is fixing itself upon a newly discovered or savage coast.20 From the outset, the expanding colony was understood as civilisation placed in conflict with savagery and confusion, and the former was expected to tame the latter. This philosophical foundation coloured relationships with the land, with the original inhabitants, and indeed with each other and Britain.

The need to demonstrate the civilised nature of the population and its spaces is a recurring thread in the imagery of nineteenth century Australia. In depictions of both town and country, the images showed a land brought to heel, shaped and made useful.

Such depictions reflect much about the ongoing relationship with Britain. In the first instance, they show not only a desire to best the strange, unfamiliar, threatening landscape, to redress it as a mirror of the land from which they had come. These renditions also hint at what would become known as the “cultural cringe”: the need to rise above the carceral origins of the society and reinvent themselves as exemplars of all that was admirable about Britain.

These insecurities carried well into the middle of the nineteenth century as ‘acclimitisation societies’ introduced species of plants and animals to make the environment familiar but also to minimise the perceived deficiencies of the non-European landscape.21 Citing the Antipodean soil and heat in which European plants struggled, racial pseudosciences expressed concerns that European races would similarly wither.22 For much of the century, artists in the Antipodes created views of the Australian colonies that referenced English visual cues and highlighted recognisable, expanding civilisation transposed into the lower latitudes.

Major James Taylor’s 1823 panoramic triptych of Sydney pp.40–42 speaks to this relationship.

The colony was a strange dichotomy, while on the one hand it was a society led by surveyors and administrators, those used to doing their duty

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Philip Slaeger A view of the town of Windsor, in New South Wales taken from the banks of the River Hawkesbury 1813 Published by Absalom West, Sydney etching The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973

to protect and expand the holdings of the crown, it could equally be characterised as a society founded on cheap labour and rum.23 Despite the use of rum as a substitute currency from time-to-time in the early colony, there is little in the early visual representations to suggest the consumption of alcohol, let alone the consumption to excess.24 Reflecting the public works building campaign initiated under Governor Lachlan Macquarie, Sydney as depicted here is very much in the vein of the neo-classicist ‘New Rome’; an ordered town housing amiable citizens.25 Much like Cole and Bricher’s paintings of Lake George, the figures are once again revelatory. Taylor’s view was one of the first to include figures as more than stock figures used as staffage. Within the print we see active military, patients within the hospital grounds, convict labourers, women in the domestic sphere, and Indigenous Australians as well as a pair assumed to be Maori or from the Polynesian islands.26 The creation of domestic space—the cottage yard—in the left panel once again makes use of women as a bell-wether, the presence

of the officers ensuring that the mores of civilised society are observed and the women can go about their tasks unafraid of either convicted or Indigenous men.27 The presence of a dog-like kangaroo in the yard and the Australian flora are indicators of the exotic transformed into the familiar, ordinary and everyday.28 In comparison the right panel retains more wild flora, rocky open space and unclothed Indigenous men, women and children. This is the area less touched by Macquarie’s influence. However, the encroachment of a single fence-line, several buildings and distant ships in Darling Harbour suggest it is only a matter of time until that influence spreads and succeeds.

The absence of conflict implies, in utopian fashion, that the transformation will be welcomed by all, the docile Indigenous populations in the other panels serving as seeming proof of their willingness to assimilate.29 Beyond their content, the prints are indicative of the ongoing visual exchange between Australia and England and the way images of the land were used

within that imperial relationship. The artist, Major James Taylor, served in Australia as a member of the 48th regiment between August 1817 and July 1822 and is one of a number of soldier-artists whose work appears in the exhibition.30 There was a strong demand in England for illustrated narratives as well as individual prints from the New South Wales colony and the visual and textual recollections of the officer class provided much material for printers and publishers.31 This particular view of Sydney also featured as a type of theatrical entertainment when it was exhibited in James Burford’s panorama rooms in Leicester Square in 1823 or 1824.32 Though greeted with some disdain by established landscape painters, the panorama was popular with the general public and remained a financial success well into the mid-nineteenth century.33 The viewer entered the panoramic rooms from below, ascending to a suspended platform that allowed the audience to be fully surrounded by the vista. Such immersive experiences created the illusion of familiarity with the topography of Sydney

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Robert Havell and Son (engraver) James Taylor (artist) The entrance of Port Jackson, and part of the town of Sydney, New South Wales 1823 Published by Colnaghi & Co., London aquatint, engraving and watercolour The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 40

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Robert Havell and Son (engraver) James Taylor (artist) Part of the harbour of Port Jackson, and the country between Sydney and the Blue Mountains, New South Wales 1823 Published by Colnaghi & Co., London aquatint, engraving and watercolour The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 41

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Robert Havell and Son (engraver) James Taylor (artist) The town of Sydney in New South Wales Published by Colnaghi & Co., London aquatint, engraving and watercolour The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973

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and a sense of connection with the far-flung colony.

A triptych of prints of the panorama was produced

by Robert Havell in connection with the Colnaghis and was sold both in England and Australia. The Australian sales were advertised with specific reference to the panoramic display in London, highlighting the weight given to the English reception of Australian landscapes.34 Visual cues emphasising an old world understanding of order were not limited to townscapes. Images of the land cleared for agriculture, tapping into European traditions of pastoralism that David Hansen has described as ‘the reconciliation of European vision and its Antipodean Other’, demonstrated the triumph of importation of English sensibility, of English civilization onto the continent.35 John Glover was particularly adept at incorporating elements of the Australian landscape—notably the bright Australian light and his signature twisted tree limbs—into an essentially European scene.36 Patterdale farm c.1840, p.75 one of a host of paintings of his Tasmanian property, is one such example. Much of the composition echoes that of his earlier paintings in the rolling hills, the presence of a resting grazier or farmhand and his dog, and importantly the contented cattle.37 While Taylor’s kangaroo is an approximation of European domestic animals, Glover eschews imitation or metamorphosis and instead, has replaced all trace of Australian fauna with solid, serene, introduced livestock. Furthermore, this is a depiction of Glover’s own farm. It is a celebration of land possessed and held according to established traditions and for traditional purposes.38 Far from the unforgiving environment of first colonisation, Glover’s landscape is a welcoming European one. It is land that promises both peace and prosperity precisely because it has become European, its savagery tamed and brought into service of its new masters.

Though the first blush of enlightenment-era desire for scientific knowledge that, in part, inspired the British southward to Australian exploration and colonisation had faded, the impulse never completely disappeared from either the land or its art. The naval explorers and their scientific colleagues were followed by successive waves of inland explorers, surveyors, naturalists, and astronomers. Art and printmaking continued to reflect both the discoveries and the institutions associated

with them. Eugene Von Guérard accompanied Georg Van Neumayer on the Kosciuszko expedition in 1862 and his 1865 painting of Castle Rock, Cape Schanck p.28 is noted for its geological and scientific accuracy.39 The use of science and scientific knowledge as the visible indicators of a civilised society similarly continued into the next stages of Anglo-European settlement in Australia. Georg Van Neumayer’s work also informs George Rowe’s The view of the city of Melbourne, from the Observatory 1858 p.44 as the observatory in question was built

by Neumayer as part of his attempts to map the earth’s magnetic field.40 The view, taken from atop Flagstaff Hill, is of a city transformed by the wealth of the gold rush, taking its first steps toward becoming the ‘seventh city of the Empire’. The notations at the base of Rowe’s panorama indicate the institutions of church and state—the Scots Church, the courts, St James and the Land offices, the Houses of Parliament and the Independent Church, the Hospital and government house—though contrary to Rowe’s image, not all had actually been completed by 1858.41 These institutions are interspersed with the purveyors of knowledge; the library, the (original) exhibition building and of course the observatory itself.

Equally interesting are the figures that populate this landscape. Nearest the observatory is a loose group of five people, three women, two men, all seemingly well dressed. On the streets below them, soldiers march in formation, once again highlighting the presence of order. Though for all that it may be recognisable as an extension of the British Empire, Rowe’s version of the city is not entirely that of an English town. A group of Chinese men with long plaits and distinctive straw hats gather in a group just below the well-to-do while another group of Chinese men walk in the far left distance past the bullock drays, loads balanced across their shoulders. Most notably in the middle of the image is a trio of Indigenous Australians, one bearing a spear, and one seemingly wearing a possum cloak. While their presence in itself is not uncommon in prints of this era, the centrality of their positioning is and runs counter to the recurring imagery of Indigenous Australians at the periphery of settled lands.

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George Rowe The view of the city of Melbourne, from the Observatory 1858 Printed by De Gruchy and Leigh, Melbourne, 1855–1869 lithograph and watercolour The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973

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Thomas Shotter Boys (lithographer) George French Angas (artist) The city and harbour of Sydney from near Vaucluse 1852 lithograph and watercolour The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973

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DISPLACEMENT AND VIOLENCE

Eugene von Guérard Stony Rises, Lake Corangamite 1857 oil on canvas Purchased with the assistance of the Utah Foundation through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 1981 Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

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The motif of the indigenous observer viewing the society that will replace their own appears in a number of the Australian works on paper. These prints all feature the ordered city, either in close or medium proximity. The indigenous figures are not simply sidelined, their perspective is such that their gaze is perpetually fixed on that which has replaced their own society. While there is a melancholy tone about these images, it does however, dispel the suggestion of inevitability, as though this displacement was intended to be read as the natural order. Indigenous Australians appear on the right-most edge of Taylor’s triptych and in George French Angas’ The city and the harbour of Sydney from near Vaucluse 1852, p.45 they stand on the cliffs looking back at Sydney. While positioned in the centre of John Skinner Prout’s Melbourne from Collingwood 1847 1847, p.79 they camp on a patch of green threatened by the ever-expanding city which looms in the middle distance. Similarly a group of Indigenous men and women stand atop a hill in Collins Street in 1843, p.78 the street in question, wide and straight beginning almost at their feet. Asher Durand’s 1853 oil painting Progress, or The Advance of Civilisation provides an American version of similar motifs. This constant reinforcement of the idea of displacement, ever-present even as the image itself undergoes a series of changes, further reinforces the narrative of inevitability within the nineteenth century discourse.

Both the American and the Australian societies framed their indigenous peoples as a ‘doomed race’, at times respected through a ‘noble savage’ lens but always incompatible with the white, civilised society and particularly incompatible with the ever-increasing desire for holdings of land.42 There was a tendency amongst some Australian painters, particularly John Glover, to paint gatherings of Indigenous Australians in fading light, symbolic of a society in its waning days. A corroboree of natives in Mills Plains 1832 p.11 serves as a case in point, as does Eugene Von Guérard’s Stony Rise, Lake Corangamite 1857.43 p.46 Glover’s paintings of Indigenous Australians remain a source of debate amongst Australian art scholars. Biographers note that he interacted relatively peacefully with Aboriginal Tasmanians, or Palawa, in the vicinity of his property.44 Glover does not characterise the Palawa as threatening, rather his depictions of them are of a primitive people at

one with nature. He does not at any point justify the deaths, round-ups and removals that occurred in securing the land for pastoral use.45 Modern audiences, therefore, are wont to read his portrayals as a condemnation.46 However, the majority of his work draws clear visual distinctions between the Tasmanian isle as inhabited by the Palawa and Tasmania as inhabited by Europeans. If his works suggests that the Palawa are part of the natural order of the land prior to contact, he equally presents a visual argument that European-style ownership and agriculture are the natural order of a civilised, Christian country.47 Glover manages to embrace a celebratory contradiction, that does not sit nearly so easily with contemporary understandings of contact history.

A recurring trope amongst American painters was to position the Native Americans in the foreground of a landscape, standing as the final barrier to national expansion. These views created a sense of what Kenneth Haltmann has called ’predatory looking’.48 Worthington Whittredge’s Indian encampment c.1870–1876 p.48 provides one such view of contact history and though more benign than the Cole/Bricher Lake George couplet, is still ultimately grounded in a vision of displacement and removal. As Whittredge does not identify which tribe, or indeed the specific geographic area (though it appears to be Colorado) it is not entirely clear whether the encampment is of Native Americans who had always lived in that region or those who had been moved westward in the clearances triggered by successive Federal Government policies. Regardless, the moment preserved by the painting is one of peace and domesticity. They are positioned in the foreground, the mountains stretching behind them. While a potential reading places them at one with the land, equally they can be interpreted as a last gate or barricade to be cleared in accessing the bountiful western lands beyond the mountains rich in minerals and the valleys suited to agriculture.

Godfrey Charles Mundy’s Mounted police and blacks, a rencounter 1852, p.49 an illustration from his memoir, Our Antipodes (1865), is one of few nineteenth century works to depict the frontier violence that was inherent in Anglo-European possession of both continents. In describing the conflict over land, he writes:

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Worthington Whittredge Indian encampment c. 1870-1876 oil on canvas Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

The political relation of the White race and the Australian blacks, with reference to the possession of the country by the former is peculiar to itself. We hold it neither by inheritance by purchase not by conquest, but by a sort of gradual eviction. As our flocks and herds and population increase, and corresponding increase of space is required, the natural owners of the soil are thrust back without treat, bargain or apology…49 While perhaps sympathetic on one hand, Mundy happily perpetrates lurid second-hand tales of cannibalism, infanticide (and the combination thereof) and violence toward women that he sees as quite in opposition to the behaviours of white men.50 The Indigenous population are, in his words, ‘savages’, savages who exhibit understandable behaviours in relation to their lands, and an attachment to that land with which they are not often credited, but savages nonetheless.51 He concludes that:

The savage is treacherous, bloodthirsty, cruel, ungrateful—often requiting the kindness and generosity of the Christian, who is really friendly to him, by burning his huts and crops or even barbarously murdering his benefactors. The civilized man is inordinately greedy of gain, and regards the black as a being scarcely above the beasts that perish. The result of this combination is the certain annihilation of the savage race.52

while doing little to curtail or reverse the process.

It is this sentiment that also pervades the visual imagery of the time. Indigenous populations are reduced to clinging to the edge of frame, or depicted as figures in an Arcadian landscape as impermanent as Puck’s dreamlike shadows. Either way, and however sympathetic the artists and viewer may be, these figures are given no role and no space within the modern civilised land that is presumed to be replacing their own.

Mundy proves to be an uncomfortable source.

One cannot presume within him any twenty-first century sensibility regarding equality of race though he is clearly troubled by injustice and condemns the violence by whites against blacks. Nevertheless he accepts as a natural order the continued possession of the land by Anglo-Europeans, even as he acknowledges what effects this will have on Indigenous peoples. Indeed, Mundy, while more inclined to provide the details of violence than many, represents a clear cross-section of Europeans in colonial Australia who lament the dispossession

48

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W. L Walton (lithographer) Godfrey Charles Mundy (artist) Mounted police and blacks, a rencounter 1852 Printed by Hullmandel & Walton, London c. 1850s; published by Richard Bentley, London 1794–1871 lithograph The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 49

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ART AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

It is impossible to fully understand the American experience of the nineteenth century without an acknowledgement of the effect on the population of the American Civil War. If westward expansion was seen as evidence of America’s destiny as a land of plenty and the model of democratic values for the rest of the globe, the Civil War threatened to sweep aside any successes associated with the republican venture. The war was both political and personal, fought over fundamental concepts such as slavery and states’ rights, but dividing families and close friends into separate armies. Much like World War One, the fighting in the Civil War was simultaneously intimate and personal, as well as mechanical and monstrous. Though the machine guns that decimated the Western Front had not come to supremacy, cannon fire, muskets and bayonets cut a swathe through the lines. Military tactics such as General Sherman’s relentless drive to the sea, chewed through men and landscapes equally. As with most civil conflicts the emotional wounds ran deep and remained raw for decades, some would argue centuries after the cessation of conflict. The war was the sublime taken to the extreme. The power and threat that when held in check epitomised beauty, had been unleashed. The ensuing destruction illustrated the terrible consequences when a society abandons restraint and civilised interactions.

Martin Johnson Heade and Sanford Robinson Gifford’s post-war works also allude to a lingering disquiet about the land. While not as overt as the blackened sky and bolts of lightening in his Thunderstorm of Narragansett Bay 1868 (Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas), Heade’s Newburyport Marshes: approaching storm c.1871 pp.76–77 still presents a land troubled. The combination of haystacks, a recurring symbol for peace and prosperity within agrarian landscape painting, with the dark storm clouds calls into question the ability to return to a pre-war innocence.54 Gifford’s Hunter Mountain, twilight 1866 p.51 is often held up as an early example of environmental painting.

A metaphoric reading, as suggested by Aaron Sachs, positions the stumps not as the literal destruction of the landscape, but rather as symbolic of the many battlefield amputations which saw a proliferation of young men with incomplete and missing limbs in the era after the war.55

As photography documented the brutal detail of the conflict, many painters instead used their art in order to communicate the emotional toll.53 Within the exhibition, both John Frederick Kensett and Fitz Henry Lane demonstrate a shift in mood between the pre-war period and that of the conflict and its aftermath. Kensett’s broad, bucolic valley in Almy Pond, Newport c.1857 pp.20–21 gives way to a turbulent sea in Near Newport, Rhode Island 1872 pp. 52–53 with flotsam of a wreck washed ashore.

Similarly, the calm, luminous prosperity of Lane’s Gloucester Harbour 1856 at crepuscule is replaced by foreboding in Brace’s Rock, Brace’s Cove 1864.

The light on the water is cut in half by a dark line of rocks and the anchored ship, once a symbol of economic prosperity, now sits run aground.

50

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Sanford Robinson Gifford Hunter Mountain, twilight 1866 oil on canvas Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

51

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John Frederick Kensett Near Newport, Rhode Island 1872 oil on canvas Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Art Acquisition Endowment Fund

52

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William Stanley Haseltine Rocks at Nahant 1864 oil on canvas Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

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FIN DE SIECLE

The transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century brought significant ideological shifts to both the United States and to Australia. The change in the imagined relationship to physical country was particularly significant in this period and, was in turn reflected in the art of both countries.

In Australia, the last two decades of the nineteenth century marked a growing sense of nationalism— part and parcel of the drive to Federation—resulting in an increasing sense of pride in the unique characteristics of the Australian continent. The Australian bush and fauna were increasingly seen as distinct rather than deficient and the so-called Heidelberg School of artists, including Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder, unapologetically captured an Australian vision of land, sea and city, all bathed in Australian light.56 Simultaneously, the relationship with the landscape evolved, losing some, though not all of the malevolent overtones. Frederick McCubbin’s iconic paintings of children lost in the bush, for example, reflected the continued fears about the potential for disorientation and disaster in this setting.57 Nevertheless, Australians increasingly viewed the natural environment as a location for leisure, and recreational societies made use of the expanding train system to access wilderness near the cities for respite and rejuvenation. Though Australian populations were increasingly urban, they defined their national character in relation to the bush and the qualities of strength and resilience the bushman was presumed to hold.58 While Americans likewise mythologised the West, the actual frontier was evaporating, increasingly tied up in large-scale holdings by railroads, cattle and lumber companies.59 American ‘manifest destiny’ was no longer limited to the continental territories and the United States began its first forays into imperial holdings in the near-Caribbean and in the Pacific.60 Internationalism also held greater sway in American art, and as the nineteenth century seeped into the twentieth, Americans became more cosmopolitan in their outlook and their identities. Europe was viewed with a less reactionary lens, and increasingly as a source for the exchange of ideas.61 Younger

artists, consciously and conspicuously set themselves apart from the Hudson River School, arguing for greater attention to brush technique, paint surface and colour rather than the relationship to natural imagery.62 For Indigenous Australians and Native Americans, alike, the new century would bring ever-increasing invisibility and hardship. They were further corralled onto missions and reservations and faced ever-more punitive government policies, particularly those regarding indigenous children. Even as they were pressured to assimilate into white, western culture, their traditional visual culture and imagery was being appropriated by non-indigenous artists.63 For all the differences between the United States and Australia, and certainly at the onset of the nineteenth century they were markedly different societies, both turned to the land to define themselves. They used the land to frame discussions about who they saw themselves as, and who they wished to become. The wide open spaces, the dense forests, and the bush set them apart from the cleared, cultivated, segmented lands of Europe and Britain.

The Americans held this as an advantage, while in Australia it was received with greater ambivalence.

The contested understandings of nature and claims of civilisation lie at the heart of much of the imagery within this exhibition, both American and Australian.

That said, it is rarely a clear dichotomy, but rather a vision of nature made functional as a source of leisure, comfort, wealth or warning within a civilised world.

Dr Meighen Katz is the Ian Potter Museum of Art’s inaugural Grimwade Collection Curator. She is currently an Honorary Research Fellow and a sessional lecturer in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne.

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Charles Conder An early taste for literature 1888 oil on canvas Mary Helen Keep Bequest, 1944 Collection: Art Gallery of Ballarat

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1. Grimwade, Sir R. “Foreword” in RTM Pescott, Collections of a Century: the first hundred years of the National Museum of Victoria. Melbourne, National Museum of Victoria, 1954, p.ix.

11. Schama, S., Landscape and Memory. New York, Vintage Books, 1996, p.364.

2. Kennedy, D.M., Cohen, L. et al, The Brief American Pagent: A History of the Republic. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000, p.188; Tindall, G.B., Shi, D.E., America: A Narrative History, Vol. 1. (3rd ed). New York, W.W. Norton & Co., pp.337–342.

13. Schama, Landscape and Memory, p.364.

3. Webber, K.H. “John Frederick Kensett: Distant View of the Mansfield Mountain” in A. Miller, C. McAuliffe et al, America, Painting a Nation. Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2013 p.17.

4. Miller, A.L., Berlo, J.C. et al, American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity. Upper Saddle River, NJ, Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008. pp.252–266.

5. Cole, T. “Essay on American Scenery,” American Monthly Magazine 1 (January 1836) pp.1–12. https://www.csun.edu/~ta3584/Cole.htm. Last accessed January 23, 2017. Art Historian Tim Barringer has cautioned though, that at times Cole represents the zeal of a convert, that for all his claims of a distinct American aesthetic, there is a discernable British/European influence at play in Cole’s work.

Barringer, T “The Englishness of Thomas Cole,” in N. Siegel (ed) The Cultured Canvas: New Perspectives on American Landscape Painting. Durham, NH, University of New Hampshire Press, 2011, pp.1–52.

6. Lipsitz, G. “Cultural Theory, Dialogue and American Cultural History”, in Haltunnen, K (ed), A Companion to American Cultural History. Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishing, 2008, pp.276–277.

7. Miller et al, American Encounters, p.259.

8. Miller et al, American Encounters pp.252-253; Siegel, N. “ ‘We the Petticoated Ones’: Women of the Hudson River School” in Siegel (ed), The Cultured Canvas, Durham, NH, University of New Hampshire Press, pp.152–155.

9. Anon, “The White Mountain (from our own correspondent)”, Harper’s Weekly, September 12, 1857, p. 579, as quoted in Siegel, “ ‘We the Petticoated Ones’” p.150.

10. Miller et al, American Encounters, pp.129, 252. For more on statesmen and philosopher Edmund Burke’s views on the sublime, see his 1757 treatise on the subject, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.

12. Kennedy et al, Brief American Pagent, pp.212–13.

14. See for example The Jolly Flatboatmen (1846), Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845) and the second version of The Jolly Flatboatmen (1877–78).

15. Miller et al., American Encounters pp.226–228; Brownlee, P.J., “ American Genre Painting: An Art of Encounter,” in American Encounters: Genre Painting and Everyday Life. Chicago, Terra Foundation for American Art, 2012, pp.28–30, 62–64; Schama, Landscape and Memory, pp.364–367.

16. Banks, J. Endeavour journal, ‘Some account of that part of New Holland now called New South Wales’, August 1770 (Series 03.733). Held State Library of NSW. http://www2.sl.nsw.gov.au/banks/series_03/ essays/03_733mr.cfm. Last Accessed January 23, 2017.

17. Watling, T. “December 13, 1791 Continued: Account of the Colony.” Letters from an Exile at Botany Bay, To His Aunt in Dumfries, Penrith, Ann Bell, 1794, p. 8. Held University of Sydney, http://setis.library.usyd. edu.au/ozlit/pdf/p00061.pdf. Last Accessed January 23, 2017.

18. Watling, “December 13, 1791 Continued: Account of the Colony.”

19. Watling, “December 13, 1791 Continued: Account of the Colony.” pp.8,12; Peel, M., Twomey, C., A History of Australia, Basingstoke, Hamp., Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp.24–25.

24. Peel, Twomey, A History of Australia, p.40; Rosenthal, M. “The Penitentiary as Paradise” in N.Thomas & D.Losche (eds) Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p.111.

25. Rosenthal, “The Penitentiary as Paradise”, pp.104, 117–121.

26. Bull, G. “Taking Place: Panorama and Panopticon in the Colonisation of New South Wales,” Australian Journal of Art, 12 (1994–95), p.91.

27. Bull, “Taking Place,”p.91.

28. Bull, “Taking Place”p.91.

29. Bull, “Taking Place,”p.92.

30. Bull, “Taking Place,”p.86.

31. Rosenthal, “The Penitentiary as Paradise” pp.40–43; Butler, R. “Printed Images of New South Wales: London and Sydney, 1880-1820” in Bunbury, A. (Ed) This Wondrous Land: Colonial Art on Paper.

Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, 2011, pp.44–47.

32. Bull, “Taking Place,” p.86; Holland, A. n.t. in Bunbury, This Wondrous Land, p.78. Burford also exhibited views of the colony by Augustus Earle. Rosenthal, “The Penitentiary as Paradise” p.43.

33. Bull, “Taking Place,” 78.

34. Bull, “Taking Place,” 86.

35. Hansen, D., John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque.

Hobart, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 2003, p.96.

20. Phillip, A., The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay. London, John Stockdale, 1789, Chap XIII.

36. Hansen, John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque p.98.

21. Minard, P., “Assembling Acclimatization: Frederick McCoy, European Ideas, Australian Circumstances”, Historical Records of Australian Science, 24 (2013), pp.9–11; Peel, Twomey, A History of Australia, pp.89–90.

37. Hoorn, J. Australian Pastoral:The Making of a White Landscape. Fremantle, WA, Fremantle Press, 2007, pp.75–79.

22. Peel, Twomey, A History of Australia, p.90.

39. Pullin, R., Eugene von Guérard: Nature Revealed.

Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, 2011, pp.216, 246.

23. Peel, Twomey, A History of Australia pp.26, 40.

38. Hoorn, Australian Pastoral, p.78.

40. Hayes, G. “George Rowe’s View of Melbourne from the Observatory 1858,” La Trobe Journal No. 88 (December 2011), pp.80–81.

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41. Hayes, “George Rowe’s View of Melbourne from the Observatory 1858,” p.81.

60. Kennedy et al, The Brief American Pageant, pp.406–423.

42. Miller et al, American Encounters, pp.24–25, 188, 222–224, 315; Peel, Twomey, A History of Australia, pp.92–93.

61. Miller et al, American Encounters, p.323.

43. McLean, “Figuring Nature: Painting the Indigenous Landscape,” in Hansen, John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque, p. 127; McPhee, J., “The Symbolic Landscape,” in Hansen, John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque, p.119.

63. Miller et al, American Encounters, p.401; Mimmocchi, D., “Making Sydney modern: the artistic shaping of the postwar city” in Edwards, D. & Mimmocchi, D., (eds), Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World, Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, 2013, p.74.

44. McLean, “Figuring Nature” pp.122–131; McPhee, “The Symbolic Landscape,” pp.118–119.

45. McLean, “Figuring Nature,” pp.131.

62. Miller et al, American Encounters, p.323.

The author gratefully acknowledges research assistance provided by Ms Margaret Sheehan.

46. McLean, “Figuring Nature,” pp.122.

47. McPhee, “The Symbolic Landscape” pp.113–114.

48. Haltmann, K., “The Reach of Desire: Figures and Structures of Predatory Looking in Early American and Australian Landscape.” Colonisation & Wilderness: Nineteenth Century American and Australian Landscape Painting. Art Gallery of WA, Perth, WA. 27–28 September, 2016.

49. Mundy, G.C, Our Antipodes: or Residence and Rambles in The Australasian Colonies with a Glimpse of the Goldfields. London, R.Bentley, 1855, p.105.

50. Mundy, Our Antipodes, pp.100–101, 105.

51. Mundy, Our Antipodes, pp.100–108.

52. Mundy, Our Antipodes, p.108.

53. Miller et al, American Encounters, pp.266–268, 271–274.

54. Miller et al, American Encounters, pp.266–267.

55. Sachs, A, Arcadian America: the Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2013, pp.138-144.

56. Peel & Twomey, A History of Australia, p.113.

57. Both paintings were entitled Lost. Lost 1886 features a girl, Lost 1907 a boy.

58. Peel & Twomey, A History of Australia, p.113.

59. Kennedy et al, The Brief American Pageant, 390–393, 402; Miller et al, American Encounters, p.300.

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Page 59 William Groombridge View of a manor house on the Harlem River, New York 1793 oil on canvas Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection Pages 60–61 Walter Preston (etcher) John Eyre (artist) View of part of the town of Parramatta in New South Wales 1812 Published by Absalom West, Sydney etching The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973

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Pages 62–65 Robert Havell Jnr (etcher) Robert Dale (artist) Panoramic view of King George’s Sound, part of the Colony of Swan River 1834 etching, aquatint and watercolour on three sheets The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973

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Thomas Cole Landscape with figures: A scene from “The Last of the Mohicans” 1826 oil on panel Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection Pages 68–69 Eugene von Guérard Ferntree Gully, Dandenong Ranges, (Victoria) (detail) 1867 Printed by Hamel & Ferguson, Melbourne, 1865-1889 colour lithograph The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973

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Tom Roberts A Sunday afternoon picnic at Box Hill c. 1887 oil on canvas Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1984

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George Inness Summer, Montclair 1877 oil on canvas Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

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Hanhart (lithographer) Eugene von GuÊrard (artist) Mt Abrupt, near Dunkeld, Western District c. 1856–57 lithograph and watercolour The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973

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John La Farge Paradise Valley 1866–1868 oil on canvas Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

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John Glover Patterdale farm c. 1840 oil on canvas Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales Purchased 1974

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Martin Johnson Heade Newburyport Marshes: approaching storm c. 1871 oil on canvas Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

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Unknown Collins Street in 1843 c. 1843 lithograph The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973

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John Skinner Prout Melbourne from Collingwood 1847 1847 lithograph and watercolour The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973

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Rennoldson (engraver) Sydney Parkinson (artist) View of Endeavour River, on the coast of New Holland, where Captain Cook had the ship laid on shore, in order to repair the damage which she received on the rock (detail) c. 1770 Published by Alexander Hogg, London, 1778–1804 engraving The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 Pages 82–83 Nathaniel Whittock (engraver) Goodman Teale (artist) The City of Melbourne, Australia (detail) 1855 Published by Lloyd Bros. & Co., London engraving and watercolour The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973

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LIST OF WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

Thomas Shotter Boys (lithographer) born England 1803, died 1874 George French Angas (artist) born England 1822, died 1886 The city and harbour of Sydney from near Vaucluse 1852 lithograph and watercolour 31.7 x 55.7 cm (image) 39.3 x 62.1 cm (sheet) The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0010 Alfred Thompson Bricher born United States 1837, died 1908 Lake George from Bolton’s Landing 1867 oil on canvas 68.6 x 127.6 cm Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection 1992.17 The Sidewheeler “The City of St Paul” on the Mississippi River, Dubuque Iowa 1872 oil on canvas mounted on board 51.1 x 96.8 cm Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection 1992.18 Charles Troedel (lithographer) born Germany 1835, died Melbourne 1906 Nicholas Chevalier (artist) born Russia 1828, died England 1902 Parker’s River waterfall, Cape Otway 1865 chromolithograph 21.8 x 32.2 cm (image) 40.6 x 50.7 cm (sheet, irreg.)

The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0644

Nicholas Chevalier born Russia 1828, died England 1902

Thomas Doughty born United States 1793, died 1856

Studley Park at sunrise 1861 oil on canvas 89.1 x 120 cm Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Gift of Mrs Dorothy Gurner 1959 59.258

In the Adirondacks c. 1822–1830 oil on canvas 61 x 76.2 cm Terra Foundation for American Art, Gift of Laurence and Ronnie Robbins 2002.1

Thomas Cole born England 1801, died United States 1848 Landscape with figures: A scene from “The Last of the Mohicans” 1826 oil on panel 66.4 x 109.4 cm Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection 1993.2 Charles Conder born England 1868, died 1909 An early taste for literature 1888 oil on canvas 61.4 x 51.2 cm Mary Helen Keep Bequest, 1944 Collection: Art Gallery of Ballarat 1994.1 Robert Havell Jnr (etcher) born England 1793, died United States 1878 Robert Dale (artist) born England 1810, died 1856

Walter Preston (etcher) born England 1777, died Australia c. 1819 John Eyre (artist) born England 1771, died after 1812 View of part of the town of Parramatta in New South Wales 1812 Published by Absalom West, Sydney etching 22.4 x 35.6 cm (image) 31.7 x 46.5 cm (sheet) The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0451 Botany Bay Harbour in New South Wales: with view of the Heads.

Taken from Cook’s Point 1812 Published by Absalom West, Sydney etching 22 x 36.1 cm (image) 32.2 x 49.2 cm (sheet, irreg.)

The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0429

Panoramic view of King George’s Sound, part of the Colony of Swan River 1834 etching, aquatint and watercolour on three sheets 18 x 271.4 cm (plate) 20.3 x 274.5 cm (sheet) The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0225

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Philip Slaeger (etcher) born England 1755, died Australia c. 1815 John Eyre (artist) born England 1771, died after 1812 View of part of the town of Parramatta in New South Wales. Taken from the north side of the river 1812 Published by Absalom West, Sydney etching 22.1 x 35.7 cm (image) 32 x 46.7cm (sheet, irreg.)

The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0430 Sanford Robinson Gifford born United States 1823, died 1880 Hunter Mountain, twilight 1866 oil on canvas 77.8 x 137.5 cm Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection 1999.57 John Glover born England 1767, died Australia 1849 A corroboree of natives in Mills Plains 1832 oil on canvas 56.5 x 71.4 cm Morgan Thomas Bequest Fund 1951 Art Gallery of South Australia 0.1466 Patterdale farm c. 1840 oil on canvas 76.6 x 115.2 cm Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales – Purchased 1974 77.1974

William Groombridge born England 1748, died United States 1811 View of a manor house on the Harlem River, New York 1793 oil on canvas 101 x 124.5 cm Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection 1992.37 Eugene von Guérard born Austria, 1811, died England 1901 Ferntree Gully, Dandenong Ranges, (Victoria) 1867 Printed by Hamel & Ferguson, Melbourne, 1865–1889 colour lithograph 32.6 x 51.5 cm (image) 51 x 69 cm (sheet) The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0672 Castle Rock, Cape Schanck 1865 oil on canvas 61 x 91.3 cm M.J.M Carter AO Collection through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 1992 Art Gallery of South Australia 926P22

Rocks at Nahant 1864 oil on canvas 56.8 x 102.9 cm Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection 1999.65 Martin Johnson Heade born United States 1819, died 1904 Newburyport Marshes: approaching storm c. 1871 oil on canvas 38.7 x 76.5 cm Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection 1999.68 George Inness born United States 1825, died Scotland 1894 Summer, Montclair 1877 oil on canvas 106.2 x 85.7 cm Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection 1999.78 Thomas Kelly born c. 1795, died c. 1841

Stony Rises, Lake Corangamite 1857 oil on canvas 71.2 x 86.4 cm Purchased with the assistance of the Utah Foundation through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 1981 Art Gallery of South Australia 811P3

Port [Fort] Phillip, Australia 1853 etching and watercolour 14.4 x 19.7 cm (image) 21 x 25.5 cm (sheet, irreg.)

The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0623

Hanhart (lithographer) Eugene von Guérard (artist) born Austria, 1811, died England 1901

John Frederick Kensett born United States 1816, died 1872

Mt Abrupt, near Dunkeld, Western District c. 1856–57 lithograph and watercolour 11.5 x 18.8 cm (image) 14 x 22.4 cm (sheet) The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0659

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William Stanley Haseltine born United States 1835, died Italy 1900

Almy Pond, Newport c. 1857 oil on canvas 32.1 x 56.2 cm Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection 1992.42

Near Newport, Rhode Island 1872 oil on canvas 36.8 x 61 cm Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Art Acquisition Endowment Fund 1999.1 John La Farge born United States 1835, died 1910 Paradise Valley 1866–1868 oil on canvas 82.9 x 106.7 cm Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection 1996.92 Fitz Henry Lane born United States 1804, died 1865 Brace’s Rock, Brace’s Cove 1864 oil on canvas 26 x 38.7 cm Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection 1999.83 Gloucester Harbor 1856 oil on canvas 56.8 x 91.6 cm Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection 1993.21 W. L Walton (lithographer) active c. 1850s Godfrey Charles Mundy (artist) born 1804, died England 1860 Mounted police and blacks, a rencounter 1852 Printed by Hullmandel & Walton, London; published by Richard Bentley, London lithograph 11 x 18.3 cm (image) 14.1 x 22 cm (sheet) The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0024

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Rennoldson (engraver) active 18th century Sydney Parkinson (artist) born England 1745, died 1771 View of Endeavour River, on the coast of New Holland, where Captain Cook had the ship laid on shore, in order to repair the damage which she received on the rock after 1770 Published by Alexander Hogg, London engraving 15.8 x 26.7 cm (image) 23.2 x 37.4 cm (sheet, irreg.)

The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0431 John Skinner Prout born England 1805, died 1876 Corio Bay from the Barabool Hills 1847 lithograph and watercolour 24.3 x 37 cm (image) 28.1 x 40.3 cm (sheet) The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0375 Melbourne from Collingwood 1847 1847 lithograph and watercolour 22.8 x 37.6 cm (image) 28.5 x 42.5 cm (sheet, irreg.)

The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0426 View from Bateman’s Hill, Melbourne 1847 lithograph and watercolour 23 x 35.3 cm (image) 30.1 x 41.6cm (sheet, irreg.)

The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0425

Tom Roberts born England 1856, died Australia 1931 A Sunday afternoon picnic at Box Hill c. 1887 oil on canvas 38.6 x 28.7 cm Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1984 84.261 George Rowe born England 1796, died 1864 The view of the city of Melbourne, from the Observatory 1858 Printed by De Gruchy and Leigh, Melbourne, 1855–1869 lithograph and watercolour 23.1 x 71.3 cm (each comp.)

55.8 x 76.8 cm (sheet) The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0017 Philip Slaeger born England 1755, died Australia c. 1815 A view of the town of Windsor, in New South Wales taken from the banks of the River Hawkesbury 1813 Published by Absalom West, Sydney etching 24.2 x 38.8 cm (image) 31.2 x 44.9 cm (sheet) The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0697

Robert Havell and Son (engraver) 1818–1828 James Taylor (artist) born England 1785, India 1829

Nathaniel Whittock (engraver) born England, 1819–1885 Goodman Teale (artist) born 1819, died Australia 1885

The entrance of Port Jackson, and part of the town of Sydney, New South Wales August 1823 Published by Colnaghi & Co., London aquatint, engraving and watercolour 39.2 x 57.4 cm (image) 45.5 x 59.8 cm (sheet, irreg.)

The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0383

The City of Melbourne, Australia 1855 Published by Lloyd Bros. & Co. London engraving and watercolour 29.1 x 53.4 cm (image) 42.3 x 63.5 cm (sheet, irreg.)

The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0228

The town of Sydney in New South Wales Published by Colnaghi & Co., London aquatint, engraving and watercolour 39.3 x 57.5 cm (image, irreg.)

40.5 x 58.4 cm (sheet, irreg.)

The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0381

Thomas Woolnoth (engraver) born England 1785, died 1857 William Westall (artist) born England 1781, died 1850

Part of the harbour of Port Jackson, and the country between Sydney and the Blue Mountains, New South Wales 1823 Published by Colnaghi & Co., London aquatint, engraving and watercolour 39.9 x 58 cm (image) 50.6 x 67 cm (sheet, irreg.)

The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0382

Untitled (View of the north side of Kangaroo Island) c. 1814 etching and engraving 16 x 23.2 cm (image) 16.4 x 23.2 cm (sheet, irreg.)

The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0303 Worthington Whittredge born United States 1820, died 1910 Indian Encampment c. 1870–1876 oil on canvas 36.8 x 55.6 cm Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection 1999.151

Unknown Collins Street in 1843 c. 1843 lithograph 20.2 x 14 cm (image) 24.5 x 14.4 cm (sheet, irreg.)

The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 1973.0309

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Nicholas Chevalier Studley Park at sunrise 1861 oil on canvas Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Gift of Mrs Dorothy Gurner 1959

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Thomas Kelly Port [Fort] Phillip, Australia 1853 etching and watercolour The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973

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Not As The Songs of Other Lands 19th Century Australian and American Landscape Painting Published by the Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, on the occasion of the exhibition Not As The Songs of Other Lands at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, 14 March –11 June 2017.

Alfred Thompson Bricher Lake George from Bolton’s Landing (detail) 1867 oil on canvas Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Text © 2017, the authors and the Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne.

ISBN: 978 0 7340 5367 1 Design by 5678 design Printed by Bambra Press Images: Phototography © Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago Lee McCrae, photography of Russell and Mab Grimwade Collection This catalogue is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.

The Ian Potter Museum of Art The University of Melbourne Victoria 3010 Australia Email potter-info@unimelb.edu.au www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au Patron Lady Potter AC

Not As The Songs of Other Lands is organised by the Ian Potter Museum of Art in collboration with the Terra Foundation for American Art, which is recognised for its generous support. This exhibition is presented in partnership with the Russell and Mab Grimwade Miegunyah Fund.

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Charles Troedel (lithographer) Nicholas Chevalier (artist) Parker’s River waterfall, Cape Otway (detail) 1865 chromolithograph The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 Cover Robert Havell Jnr (etcher) Robert Dale (artist) Panoramic view of King George’s Sound, part of the Colony of Swan River (detail) 1834 etching, aquatint and watercolour on three sheets The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973

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N OT AS T HE SO N G S OF OTHE R LANDS

N OT A S T HE S ON G S OF OT H E R L A N D S 19th Century Australian and American Landscape Painting

The Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne

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