In England, although he had been exhibited at the Royal Academy, it had again rejected his application for membership. His English and European landscapes, they seem to have felt, were not distinctive enough: his watercolours — and he was active in marketing the genre generally — were seen as potboilers. Glover hoped for some sort of rejuvenation. “The expectation of finding a new Beautiful World,” he wrote to a patron, “new landscapes new trees new flowers new Animals Birds &c &c is delightful to me.”

“I mean to take possession of 2,000 Acres,” Glover continued, and “to have a vineyard &c &c upon it.” Born the son of a tenant farmer, a gentleman-proprietor is what he wanted to be, and became. A responsible but strict father, he ran a tight ship: one (unmarried) son functioned as his personal assistant. Altogether, with the sons and their families, free labourers and convict servants, Glover was patriarch to some thirty or forty people. (We tend to forget that big colonial properties were in effect small villages.) Eventually he ran some 3000 sheep on the property, named Patterdale after a favourite spot in the Lake District. And there he died.

Ron Radford’s book, building on the scholarship of Ian McPhee, David Hansen and others, is particularly focused — as the subtitle indicates — on Glover’s Tasmanian period. But due attention is given to the English and Continental paintings, since Glover kept producing them even at Patterdale. The thing was, they sold — in England. In Tasmania, inferior paintings by English artists were preferred by homesick settlers. And they had no interest in local scenes. Apart from a few commissions, it was only at the end of his life that Glover sold one or two major Tasmanian paintings locally. He was, as Radford puts it, “the key, though isolated, figure in what can be called Tasmania’s ‘golden age’ of colonial prosperity, culture and art.”

Radford, as a sometime gallery director, is fully aware of the importance of the market, together with patronage and questions of framing. This practicality carries across to the placement of the sumptuous illustrations: they are always adjacent to the discussion of the paintings, even repeated if necessary.

Glover was a practical, prudent man — except when it came to his house. Perhaps in his enthusiasm he was led to over-estimate his own abilities, for Patterdale was built hurriedly and mistakenly on damp clay, near a soak, and of rubble sandstone. Floors and walls were inadequately joined: the façade fell away in the 1940s, to be replaced by one in concrete and weatherboard. Later there was risk of further collapse. An interesting chapter relates the post-Glover history of the house, culminating in its purchase, rebuilding and elegant restoration by Rodney and Carol Westmore.

Glover had already turned to oils in England, but at Patterdale he painted in them almost exclusively, responding to the new environment with his greatest burst of creativity. The result, writes Radford, is a succession of “realistic and light-filled celebrations of his recently adopted country.” He explains that Glover adapted a technique from his watercolouring, using a white ground which would glow through translucent glazes, helping to capture the intensity of Australian light. Indeed, the painter rose immediately to the challenge of a new country: in an early painting of a gully on Mt Wellington there is no idealisation, but characteristically Australian forest regrowth after fire, and dead stumps.

Even so, while alive to the “thrilling and graceful play in the landscape,” Glover found it more difficult to render than European ones. “There is a remarkable peculiarity in the trees,” he noted, “however numerous, they rarely prevent your tracing, through them, the whole distant Country.”

As was customary at the time, Glover did not perceive such vistas as the direct result of Aboriginal land management — burning the undergrowth to create pastures for kangaroos and wallabies, thereby making hunting easier. The assumption of white settlers was that all this was a God-given natural pasture, just waiting for the sheep and cattle to arrive. (A rare romantic strategy by Glover was to supplant sheep in his paintings with cattle, more picturesque.)

Radford is at pains to show that Glover was keenly sympathetic to the Palawa (Tasmanian Aborigines). The last tribals were being rounded up by George Augustus Robinson when Glover arrived in the colony. Robinson turned up at Patterdale with a small group of them, was well-received, and was shown massacre sites. Tellingly, Glover’s very first — and possibly last — paintings there would be of moonlight corroborees. At every opportunity he inserted the departed Aborigines into his landscapes. For Robinson he produced a painting of Aborigines Dancing at Brighton, Tasmania, explaining that “the figures are too small to give much likeness — my object was to give an idea of the gay happy life the Natives had before the White people came,” and also, he added, “an idea of the Scenery of the Country.” Interestingly, there are almost no whites and no cultivation in his landscapes. They are Edenic, essentially a record of what they were like before the invasion.

At one level Glover was, as the historian W.K. Hancock put it, “shedding an economical tear” about the displacement. For it was so recent, and in stark contrast to Glover’s sense of his own achievement on the same land, caught forever in the famous paintings of his house and garden and in the “My” of My Harvest Home. A contradiction: you might say that — surrealistically — his characteristic spaghetti gum trees had buckled under the strain. For there are few like that around Patterdale, yet Glover fixated on them; they became a trope. Significantly, Radford points to a yearning for synthesis: late works include an ambiguous Ben Lomond (Scotland — or Tasmania?) and the fanciful A Dream At 82.

Glover is still underestimated. Working in Tasmania alone and now perceived as a white man, he was described only a few weeks ago in the press as the “so-called father of Australian landscapes.” Yet, as Ron Radford tells us, he is still the Australian artist most widely represented in galleries abroad — extending to a good half dozen American ones, and the Louvre. Equally tellingly, Tom Roberts — having married into a northern Tasmanian family — painted the landscape Glover’s Country in homage around 1929. When he died a couple of years later, Roberts chose not to be buried where he lived, at Kallista in Victoria, but in a Tasmanian churchyard within view of Glover’s Ben Lomond. And twenty years ago, the locals of Evandale instituted the annual Glover Prize for Tasmanian landscapes, a prestigious and generous award.

In all, it is an impressive node of continuing influence, buttressed by the preservation order recently placed on the Patterdale landscape and the scrupulous restoration of the house. Ron Radford’s book will go a long way to making Glover even better known. •

John Glover: Patterdale Farm and the Australian Landscape
By Ron Radford | Ovata Press | $49.95 | 216 pages

The post John Glover, born-again artist in Tasmania appeared first on Inside Story.

For Jessie Traill and Hilda Rix Nicholas, travel became more than a rite of artistic passage: it was a peripatetic urge that shaped their lives. Traill, in particular, never stopped, her name becoming the symbol of her life and journeying. To set off for Central Australia by car in 1928 (when she was forty-seven) was no mean feat, and she continued to make regular trips to England into her eighties. She was so well-known in the village of Alnwick in Northumberland that she was regarded as a local.

Born in 1881 and 1884 respectively, these restless women both lost their fathers in their twenties. In 1906, as the Rix family (sisters Hilda and Elsie, mother Elizabeth and father Henry) were planning their first journey together to London, Henry contracted cardiac problems, and died. Their financial circumstances somewhat reduced, the women set off regardless. In 1907, while Traill was in Rome with her father Hamilton and sister Minna, Hamilton suddenly passed away. Jessie did not return to Australia but instead settled in London, where she studied with the artist and printmaker Frank Brangwyn, and set the course for her career. The loss of the father – which, fortunately for both young artists, did not mean a dire loss of income – triggered the decision to commit themselves to lives as professional artists. Perhaps it also set them free.

Money and fathers played an enormous role in the destiny of women artists in the first half of the twentieth century. If Daddy didn’t want his daughter to study art, there was little chance that she could. For middle-class young ladies, art was regarded as a charming feminine accomplishment, like singing or playing the piano nicely, that could take its place decorating her father’s, and later her husband’s, home. It was virtually impossible, however, for a working-class girl to aspire to the artist’s life, to the long years of study and travel abroad, the relentless round of exhibiting and the cost of renting a studio. If a working-class girl wished to embrace la vie bohème, she could become an artist’s model, but they were considered to be little more than prostitutes.

Though both Traill and Rix Nicholas continued to regard Australia as home, both spent years away, and weathered the first world war (and in Traill’s case, the second) in England. Their paths were almost identical at different points, but there’s no evidence to suggest that the paths of these two very different personalities crossed. Traill was reserved, pious and hardy; Rix Nicholas was bold, bubbly and impetuous. Both lived large lives in terms of travel and ambition, but Traill chose a reclusive domestic life with her sisters – she never married – while Rix Nicholas contrived life as a stage for herself and her work, a place where she could star.

It was an approach that served Rix Nicholas well in Tangier. A European woman artist alone, sketching in the marketplace, was nothing short of astounding to the locals, especially as this was an Islamic society where image-making was forbidden. While that made it difficult for Rix Nicholas to find models, especially among women who were usually veiled, the intrepid artist nevertheless managed to “pot” subjects, even if it meant making composite portraits from several different people. Once the locals caught Rix Nicholas observing them with an eye to sketching, they disappeared into the crowd. But she persisted, smartly moving off if she sensed she was causing offence or irritation. She had her admirers, too, and folk crowded about to watch as she drew, and congratulated her on her efforts. Indeed, the crowds became so enthusiastic that Elsie appointed herself as Hilda’s guardian.

The colour and clarity of Rix Nicholas’s work, the pleasure she takes in sunlight, her palette of delicious blues and whites, her picturesque settings and North African “types” could not be more different from Traill’s sombre, sepia-toned etchings of landscapes natural and built, where a face is rarely glimpsed let alone a personality gauged.

Against type: Jessie Traill’s The Red Light, Harbour Bridge, June 1931. National Gallery of Australia

Traill studied with Frank Brangwyn in order to develop her skills as a printmaker. Until then her work had been mediocre, but the larger-than-life Brangwyn – painter, muralist and designer of interiors and furniture, a man both prodigiously energetic and irascible – inspired her to do better. For her part, Traill seems to have won him over. When, exhausted, he resigned his teaching activities, she continued to work at his home studio.

Brangwyn’s etchings, unusually large for that time, took as their subject architectural forms cast in dramatic shadow. Traill followed suit. The influence of Brangwyn’s style and subject matter, though not his scale, can be seen, for example, in Traill’s many etchings of the Sydney Harbour Bridge under construction. As curator Macushla Robinson has written, Traill “rarely portrayed the interior scenes and still lifes that were considered acceptable subject matter for women at the time.” Against type, Traill favoured big, heavy, “masculine” subjects. But her prints are often so dark, it is hard to make them out. Why the gloom?

Perhaps the answer lies in the status of her chosen medium. At the Art Gallery of NSW’s recent exhibition of key works by the brilliant and influential American photographer Alfred Steiglitz, I was surprised to find that many of the prints were tiny and dark. In fact, all I could see when I gazed at them was my own reflection. These were Steiglitz’s original prints; in reproduction, they are bigger, clearer and more commanding. Like Traill’s prints, they come from a period when photography and printmaking were regarded as secondary art forms, inferior to the great art of painting. Both media sought to emulate painting’s effects – especially “painterly” effects, such as shadow – in an effort to gain credibility as the equal of painting, and both “went dark” as a result. Traill’s darkness is used to effect in her architectural studies – the buildings loom, and even threaten – but it is in her studies of nature that the perpetual twilight is truly haunting.

These are handsome books. Stars in the River is beautifully produced and printed on luscious creamy paper. From Roger Butler’s introduction, we learn that this project has been a long labour of love. Butler has made an enormous contribution to Australian printmaking as a curator at the National Gallery of Australia, and before that, when he ran a private gallery in the 1970s. He was the first to promote many women printmakers, including Margaret Preston and Thea Proctor, who have gone on to become legends of Australian art and whose prints gain high prices at auction.

Moroccan Idyll is also a lovely object. The designers have opted for a small paperback format, comparable in size to a paperback novel, and have illustrated it richly with paintings, drawings, photographs and letters. While comparing Rix Nicholas’s work with that of Matisse may not do the former any favours, including Matisse’s masterpieces in the book creates a texture redolent of North African colours, space and light. •

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