Arthur Streeton
Sir Arthur Ernest Streeton was an Australian landscape painter and a leading member of the Heidelberg School, also known as Australian Impressionism.
Early life
Streeton was born in Mount Moriac, Victoria, south-west of Geelong, on 8 April 1867, the fourth child of Charles Henry and Mary Streeton. His family moved to the Melbourne suburb of Richmond in 1874. His parents were English migrants who had met on their voyage to Australia in 1854. In 1882, Streeton commenced art studies with George Folingsby at the National Gallery School.In 1885, Streeton exhibited works for the first time with the Victorian Academy of Art. He found employment as an apprentice lithographer under Charles Troedel.
Career
During the summer of 1886–87, Streeton, aged nineteen, first befriended Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin while painting en plein air at Mentone Beach. The pair greatly admired Streeton's work and invited him to join them at artists' camps they had established in both Mentone and Box Hill. They were later joined by Charles Conder, beginning a two-year period of close creative companionship, and forming the core group of what became known as the Heidelberg School movement, later also called Australian impressionism. Streeton's work rapidly improved during this period, and by 1888 he was widely considered one of Victoria's most gifted young painters.Streeton was exhibiting and perhaps painting in the studio of his friend Roberts at Grosvenor Chambers, Collins Street by May 1888.
Eaglemont camp, Heidelberg
In the summer drought of 1888, Streeton travelled by train to the attractive agricultural and grazing suburb of Heidelberg, 11 km north-east of Melbourne's city centre. He intended to walk the remaining distance to the site where Louis Buvelot painted his 1866 work Summer afternoon near Templestowe, which Streeton considered "the first fine landscape painted in Victoria". On the return journey to Heidelberg, wet canvas in hand, Streeton met Charles Davies, brother-in-law of friend and fellow plein air painter David Davies. Charles gave him "artistic possession" of an abandoned homestead atop the summit of Mount Eagle estate, offering spectacular views across the Yarra Valley to the Dandenongs. For Streeton, Eaglemont was the ideal working environment—a reasonably isolated rural location accessible by public transport. The house itself could be seen by visitors as they arrived at Heidelberg railway station.Streeton spent the first few nights at Eaglemont alone with the estate's tenant farmer Jack Whelan, and slept upon the floor, the rooms being bare of furniture. Of his first few nights at the house, Streeton said it was "creaking and ghostly. A long dark corridor seemed full of past visions, and out of doors a blurred rich blackness against the sharp brilliance of the Southern Cross... But tobacco and wine weighed healthily against the darkness". He descended the hill daily to Heidelberg village for meals before jaunting into the bush with a billycan of milk and swag of paints and canvases. The first artists to paint with Streeton at Eaglemont were the National Gallery students Aby Altson and John Llewellyn Jones, followed by John Mather and Walter Withers. Like Streeton, Withers painted from nature amidst suburban bush around Melbourne, employing earthy colours with loose, impressionistic brushstrokes. By the end of 1888, he became a weekend visitor to the camp.
About the same time, Streeton met the artist Charles Conder, who travelled down from Sydney in October 1888 at the invitation of Tom Roberts. One year Streeton's junior, Conder was already a committed plein airist, having been influenced by the painterly techniques of expatriate impressionist Girolamo Nerli. Conder and Roberts joined Streeton at Eaglemont in January 1889 and helped make some modest improvements to the house. Despite austere living conditions, Streeton felt content: "Surrounded by the loveliness of the new landscape, with heat, drought, and flies, and hard pressed for the necessaries of life, we worked hard, and were a happy trio." Streeton and Conder quickly became friends and influenced one another's art. Their shared love of South Australian poet Adam Lindsay Gordon's lyrical verse is revealed in the titles of some of their Eaglemont paintings, including Streeton's romantic gloaming work Above us the great grave sky. Later, critics would describe some of the pair's Eaglemont paintings as companion pieces, as both artists often painted the same views and subjects using a high-keyed "gold and blue" palette, which Streeton considered "nature's scheme of colour in Australia".
Two of Streeton's best-known works were painted during this period—Golden Summer, Eaglemont and Still glides the stream, and shall for ever glide —each a sunlit pastoral scene of golden-paddocked plains stretching to the distant blue Corhanwarrabul. In 1891, Arthur Merric and Emma Minnie of the Boyd artistic dynasty took Golden Summer, Eaglemont to Europe where it became the first painting by an Australian-born artist to be exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, and was awarded a Mention honourable at the 1892 Paris Salon.
Sydney and travels inland
On 2 June 1890, in the wake of an economic depression in Melbourne, Streeton sailed to Sydney, and initially stayed there with his sister in the suburb of Summer Hill. He soon relocated to Curlew Camp, a plein air artists' camp on Sydney Harbour, where he painted many views of his natural surroundings and was visited by a number of artists, including Julian Ashton and Albert Henry Fullwood, who stayed at the camp for extended periods. Tom Roberts later joined him also, continuing their artistic friendship. From 1891, Streeton began travelling widely in rural New South Wales. As well as painting scenes of Sydney Harbour and Coogee, and urban scenes of Sydney, it was during the early to mid-1890s that he painted some of his major rural landscapes, including the Hawkesbury River series and 'Sydney Harbour inspired many of Streeton's most poetic Symbolist paintings, a number of which infuse the Australian landscape with mythological subjects. The city also spurred his interest in the decorative arts as he painted on fans, furniture, musical instruments and other objects. The influence of Japanese art, such as kakemono, is evidenced in the extreme vertical formats and compositional elements he favoured around this time.
In 1893, Streeton wrote in Sydney's Daily Telegraph criticising a proposal by a mining company to develop a colliery on the shores of Sydney Harbor, which would necessitate the cutting down of a great many gum trees. His letter, which came to be known as "Streeton's shriek", read in part:
The letter helped raise public alarm over the proposal, and in 1895, Streeton painted Cremorne pastoral, his largest harbour composition, as "an elegiac image of what believed would be lost" if the project went head. When it went on exhibition later that year, the Art Gallery of New South Wales acquired the work and publicly endorsed Streeton's protests. The government, in the face of mounting backlash, was forced to abandon the mining project. Cremorne pastorals status as an environmental protest painting is considered groundbreaking in Australian art history.
Overseas and life in England
In 1897 Streeton sailed for London on the Polynesian, stopping at Port Said before continuing on via Cairo and Naples. He held an exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1900 and became a member of the Chelsea Arts Club in 1903. Although he had developed a considerable reputation in Australia, he failed to achieve the same success in England. His trips to London were financed by the sales of his paintings at home in Australia.His time in England reinforced a strong sense of patriotism towards the British Empire and, like many, anticipated the coming war with Germany with some enthusiasm. In 1906, Streeton returned to Australia and completed some paintings at Mount Macedon in February 1907 while staying with his patrons the Pinschofs at Hohe Warte. These included the notable five feet by three feet Australia Felix and a number of other smaller paintings.
Streeton returned to London in October. He married Esther Leonora Clench, a Canadian violinist, in 1908 and paintings done during their honeymoon in Venice in September that year, including The Grand Canal, were exhibited in Australia in July 1909 as "Arthur Streeton's Venice". In Australia again in April 1914 he held exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne and went back to England in early 1915.
War artist
Along with other members of the Chelsea Arts Club, including Tom Roberts, he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps at the age of 48. He worked at the 3rd London General Hospital in Wandsworth and reached the rank of corporal.Streeton was made an Australian Official War Artist with the Australian Imperial Force, holding the rank of Honorary Lieutenant, and he travelled to France on 14 May 1918 and was attached to the 2nd Division, receiving his movement order on 8 May 1918. He worked in France, with a break in August, until October 1918. Expected by the Commonwealth to produce sketches and drawings that were "descriptive", Streeton concentrated on the landscape of the scenes of war and did not attempt to convey the human suffering. Unlike more famous military art
Two paintings from this period, Villers Bretonneux and Boulogne, are in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.