Visions of Two Raw Continents

By ROBERT HUGHES

Suppose you started digging a hole on the bank of the Hudson River, the cradle of American 19th century landscape as painted by Thomas Cole, Frederic Church and others. Suppose you kept digging straight down through the center of the earth and came out on the other side. The hole would open up just off Tasmania, the island state of Australia, painted in the 19th century by, among others, John Glover and W.C. Piguenit. There wasn't a single artist in Australia in, say, 1870 who had heard of the Hudson River School. Nor was there one in America who had the smallest notion that landscapes were even being painted in the remote Antipodes, let alone of what they might be. Never, one may confidently say, have two groups of Western landscape artists influenced each other less or known less about each other. Not just less. Zero, zip, nada. So why the exhibition now on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., "New Worlds from Old: 19th Century Australian & American Landscapes"?

In brief, because of the value of comparison. Australia was the last, and North America the second to last, of the habitable continents to be colonized by Europeans sharing what was essentially a common art tradition. Both continents in the 19th century were still largely wilderness. So how did the painting of wilderness, and of its ordering, play out in both places? What kinds of values were assigned to landscape by the respective artists? What images arose from the colonists' desire to claim the land, to "humanize" it, to put their stamp on it? How did the white invaders see the native peoples--American Indians on one continent, Aborigines on the other--and what did they feel about their destruction?

Such are the questions explored by the show, and an intelligently curated and truly absorbing show it is. But then, this Australian-born critic has a bias. Americans, to the extent that they think about Australia at all, tend to imagine it as the Wild West they began to lose a century ago, but with koalas. Australian culture, except for some of its pop music and literature, is wretchedly underreported in the U.S. In fact, this is the first effort ever made by an American museum even to show any images made in Australia in the 19th century, let alone give them context and historical placement.

The great difference between Australian and American landscape experience in the early 19th century was that Americans tended to see their wilderness as God's promise, whereas Australians emphatically didn't. Northeastern America had been settled by free, self-exiled Puritans, convinced of their sacred mission to convert "the Lord's waste," the forests of New England, into a place fit for God's elect. In the 17th century the Wild West was in the East, but by the early 19th the frontier had moved thousands of miles westward, taking with it the same optimistic, sacramental fantasy, translating it into the pompous and morally corrosive idea of Manifest Destiny. The farther west you went, the freer you became.

Australia wasn't like that. It began not as a place for self-appointed saints carrying out their radical notions of God's design, but as a jail, a receptacle for the convict outcasts of England. It had no rhetoric of God and Country, and mercifully still doesn't. It was born in sin, not in virtue. The walls of the prison were not brick and stone but space itself. Australia had no Mississippi or Missouri, no fertile center; explorers went out into it, found little but desert, and died. The literary myth of its landscape, created by writers from the 1850s on, was at best hardscrabble survival--not America's lavish reward to the pioneer. Australia didn't rhyme with many words, but "failure" was one.

Still, in early Australia as in America, what artists' clients wanted was the imagery of success and progress in claiming and settling the land. Early 19th century Australian painters, like their counterparts in America, thus showed little interest in painting the wild--until it became a tourist sight. They did farms, villages, settled acres--images that would attract new settlement.

The first artist to develop fully the landscape-as-property theme in Australia was John Glover (1767-1849), who settled in Tasmania at the ripe age of 64. He was a mediocre professional who knew, and sedulously imitated, the work of Claude Lorrain. But in Australia he did the best work of his life, celebrating the pastoral delights of land ownership and commemorating the Aborigines, whose way of life was being inexorably destroyed by white farmers like him. No painter in Australia ever committed himself as wholeheartedly to recording the life of Aborigines as, say, American artist George Catlin did to that of Indians. But Glover clearly meant The Last Muster of the Aborigines at Risdon, 1836, to be a muted elegy: those black figures, dwarfed by the huge and almost artificially sinuous gum trees, were in fact about to be removed to an offshore island.

Australia, like America, had grand spectacles of nature: gorges, waterfalls, rain forests, mountains. It also had disasters, one of which was recorded by Piguenit (1836-1914) in the most striking of his paintings, The Flood in the Darling 1890, 1895, with its biblical waste of waters spreading beneath a leaden but vivaciously painted sky.

If there's a similarity between an American painter of sublime, theatrical Western scenery like Albert Bierstadt and an Australian one like the more modest Eugene von Guerard, it isn't accidental. Both received the same training at the Dusseldorf Academy and acquired skill at the tight, glossy, detailed rendering of grandiose scenes. Von Guerard joined the gold rush to Australia in 1852 but failed as a prospector, and made a career for 30 years painting two kinds of scenery: portraits of the settled acres of the well-to-do pastoralists; and views of more exotic wildness, from the bizarrely sculpted sea cliffs of Cape Schanck to the Australian Alps. These mountains are low in comparison to Bierstadt's Rockies, but Von Guerard memorably recorded what he saw from the 7,000-ft. summit of the tallest of them, in North-East View from the Northern Top of Mount Kosciusko, 1863. It is not, as Bierstadt's mountains tended to be, a made-up scene, and those smooth palomino flanks of brown grass and summer snowdrift between the granite outcrops are strikingly true to life.

The last step in the creation of 19th century Australian landscape was taken by the group known as the Australian Impressionists, whose most gifted members were Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts. Between them they created a landscape idiom that would last for decades and is still enormously popular there today: the blue-and-gold bush, with its clear light and exquisite transparencies. They weren't Impressionists in the orthodox, French sense--their work had nothing to do with Monet, for instance; their sources lay in late 19th century French realism and, above all, in the work of Whistler.

Roberts aspired to paint vigorous narratives of national identity, of hard, challenging work in the bush: A Break Away!, 1891, his rendering of young jackeroos (Australian for cowboys) galloping furiously to head off a stampeding mob of sheep, remains a national icon a century later. Streeton painted not wilderness but settled pastoral land, framed by vast space. In The Purple Noon's Transparent Might, 1896 (the title is from Shelley: culturally, England still bore strongly on these highly nationalist artists), the high-keyed light and crisp, decisive brushwork create a broad, deep and coherent space brimming with heat.

Such paintings are among the best landscapes of the late 19th century, not just in Australia but anywhere. They realize the ambition Streeton described in a letter to Roberts, his painting buddy: "I fancy large canvases all glowing and moving in the happy light, and others bright decorative and chalky and expressive of the hot trying winds and the slow immense summer." But the immensity doesn't dwarf or trivialize the works of man, and this skill at conveying what is pleasurable in landscape is part of the key to Streeton's unfading popularity in his own country.