Arthur Streeton's landscapes: 1930s.

Timing for the Heidelberg landscape artists was perfect. With growing nation­alism and a push towards Federation, Australia was rapidly moving away from its colonial history. Artists and writers were searching for colours, landscapes, char­act­ers and weather that were uniquely Aust­ral­ian. Golden Summer, Eaglemont 1889 was painted during a hot leisurely summer, an epic work with gum trees.

Federation was not formally proclaimed in Australia until 1/1/1901, but the seductive lure of London and Paris was already calling artists “home” to Europe’s cultural capitals. In 1897 Streeton sailed for London where was a huge excitement in living in London & Paris, but there was also a cost. Australian artists in Europe were out of contact with the land that had inspired them for 20 years and the cities that had nurtured them. As beautiful as the Normandy coast might have been, for example, it was not the Grampians and it was not Sydney Harbour.

So Streeton returned to Australia several times from 1906 on and re-en­gaged with the Aus­tralian landscape. During WW1 Streeton joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and worked at the 3rd London General Hospital, Wandsworth. He ret­urned permanently to Aus­tr­alia in 1920.

Geelong Galleryshowed the Land of the Golden Fleece; Arthur Streeton in the Western District. It was a major exhibition of 30 land­scapes in Victoria’s Western District and in those coastal areas he freq­uented eg Lorne. In his works Streeton painted outside in a count­ry rich in earth and sky, a land of possibility. Even after WW1 Streeton still regarded the Australian land as a symbol of national pride,

prosperity and identity.

When Streeton bought 5 acres of land at Olinda in Melbourne’s Dandenong Ranges in 1921, he probably didn’t know how important it would become in his life and art. He built Longacres in 1924, with ex­tensive flower gardens and surr­ounding hills. Olinda became the set­ting for Streeton to consol­idate his impressionist skills with colour and light, and to find ways of representing the Australian landscape.

Over a decade, the Streetons travelled between The Grange in suburban Toorak and Longacres in rural Olinda. Afternoon Sky at Ol­in­da c1934 was painted in Longacres, surrounded by hillsides and long vistas. The painting’s smallish size sugg­ested he wanted a close-up section of the left-hand side of his largest Dand­en­ong Range subjects, A Southern View Olinda 1933. The painting show­ed how warm, late sunlight played over the landscape, a painting he successfully exhib­ited at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Gallery in Aug 1933.

Menzies said Streeton was a master of record­ing the intersection between land and sky, and the visual effects cr­eat­ed by passing cl­ouds. In Afternoon Sky, he focused on a small land­scape, the incline of a cleared, sunny, open field, contrast­ed with a ver­tical rectangular section of puffy clouds. In his work, nature was benign, finding parallels in the famous series of cloud studies by Eng­lish painter John Constable (1776–1837). From 1821, Constable produced a remark­able group of en-plein-air oil studies of the cloud form­at­ions, recording the weather conditions at different times of day. Const­ab­le’s Cloud Study 1821, at Yale Centre for British Art in New Haven, provided a direct model for Street­on. Note the ephemeral nature and structure of a cloud form­ation, with just a fraction of detail at the base of the  painting to anchor sky to earth. 

However in other paintings from the mid–1930s, eg Storm over Maced­on 1936, Streeton conveyed the vigorous drama of a lightning strike as it un­leashed its pent-up energy. Streeton said his strong dramatic canvas was inspired by Shelley’s poem The Cloud 1820.

While the modern viewer may not be rapt in clouds, he/she can now understand the devast­ating destruction of native trees, fields and forests in Melbourne’s hilly outer suburbs.

Streeton was knighted for his services to art in 1937, retired to the rural outer suburb of Olinda in 1938 and stopped painting. He died at Olinda in 1943.