- This essay is an edited extraction from the author's Doctoral thesis on Australian colonial art criticism.
- If it is true that what is actual, is actual for one place and one time only, (T.S.Eliot) why is it that we all recognise the validity of the reality that is held within us?
- Robert Dixon and others have discussed the efforts made to construct “civilised’ views of the early penal colony. I am here only discussing the mid-century landscape views of pastoral Australia. See Robert Dixon, “Colonial Newsreel’, in Creating Australia.200 Years of Art. 1788–1988, Adelaide, 1988, p.67. W.T. Mitchell's very interesting article on landscape would appear to make a distinction between New Zealand landscape and Australian. I do not believe the differences, especially in the mid-colonial period, are indeed that strong, especially given the artists which the two countries had in common. See W.T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape’ in Landscape and Power, (W.T. Mitchell, ed.), Chicago, 1994, p.21.
- Used by Barbara Novak, American Painting in the Nineteenth Century, New York, 1979, (second edition), p.23.
- The term was coined by Ronald Paulson, The Aesthetics of Possession, London, 1989.
- Quoted in Novak, Op. cit., p.70.
- Our road lay through the bush. In India I should have said the jungle, and in Europe, the forest. The bush is a generic term in the colony, and signifies a district of the country in a state of nature.’ Tegg's Monthly Magazine, vol.1, 1836, p.62, quoted in The Australian National Dictionary, Melbourne, 1988, p.112.
- See Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, OUP, 1989, for an account of the earliest reactions by Europeans toward Aborigines (hard primitives) as to other South Pacific peoples (soft primitives).
- Stephen Roberts, The Squatting Age in Australia, 1835–1847, Melbourne, 1935.
- Marjorie Barnard, A History of Australia, Sydney, second edition, 1963, p.286.
- G. Nadel, Australia's Colonial Culture. Ideas, men and Institutions in Mid-nineteenth Century Eastern Australia, Cambridge, Mass, 1957, pp.29–30.
- Susan Stewart, On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Baltimore, 1984, p.23.
- Stewart, p.23.
- Paulson, p.250.
- Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, London, 1990, p.13.
- Op. cit., p. 15.
- Op. cit., p. 107.
- John Barrell, The ldea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, Cambridge, 1972, p.62
- Gombrich (in Art and Illusion, 1968, p.73) addresses the problem of the artist tending “to see what he paints rather than paint what he sees’ and Novak makes a similar point when discussing American Luminist painting of the differences between perceptual and conceptual art in this period, with the latter being predetermined by what the mind knows about a character or essence of an object. Novak, Op. cit., p.98.
- Marcus Clarke's gloomy and Gothick description of the Australian Alps was obstensibly related to Chevalier's “folksy’ image, The Buffalo Ranges 1866 (NGV), (reprinted in Bernard Smith, Documents on Art and Taste in Australia 1770–1914, Melbourne, 1975, pp. l37–140.) While it has been frequently used to describe a generally felt attitude to the bush, I believe it has more to do with Clarke's own melancholia, which in 1874 had plumbed new depths with his insolvency. It is also somewhat ironic, being in the manner of a Gothick horror tale à la Poe. I disagree with Ian McLean's reading in this issue that Clarke (known as an atheist) sought redemption. If anything, he sought oblivion, a state he soon achieved by drinking himself to death at the age of 35.
- Marjorie Barnard, A History of Australia, Sydney, second edition, 1963, p.157.
- My Note Book, (‘Fine Arts: Victorian Scenery’,11 July 1857, p.231) by an anonymous critic (probably James Edward Neild).
- This trend was further exploited by the Heidelberg painters later in the century.
- Paulson, Op. cit, p.267
- ‘Locke permits us to look at eighteenth-century English art through a discourse of property in which the users are pitted against the makers: the spectators, connoisseurs, and critics, as well as the owner, patron, and connoisseur, with their belief in the primacy of idea, disegno, and intellectual distance vs the painter or poet and the primacy of the labor or touch of his hand and the self-possession of the art object’. (Paulson, p.249.)
- Novak, Op. cit., p.20.
- Joseph is here discussing this in the work of Tennyson. Quoted in Merrill, Lynn L. Merrill, The Romance of Victorian Natural History, New York, 1986, pp.128–129.
- See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing London, 1989, pp.83–89.
- There is insufficient space here to explore this subject.
- Stephen Bann, ‘Ruskin, Kenneth Clark and After: Imitative and Symbolic Paradigms in the Modern Art of Landscape’, in J.C. Eade (ed), Projecting the Landscape, Canberra, 1987, p.4.
- ‘.. to fix in the optic situation of the creative hour only that which is visible and actual and to get the better of subjective boundlessness by closer approximation to nature…’. See Heinrich Schwartz, Art and Photography. Forerunners and Influences, edited by William Parker, Chicago, 1987, p.86. See also Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, London, 1989, pp.131–134. In September 1858 in colonial Melbourne, land and photography enjoyed very close (if rather direct) links when John Noone, a Melbourne photographer, offered allotments of land at Talbot with every portrait photograph for one guinea. After giving away 700 blocks within a matter of weeks, he had to stop the offer. See J. Kerr (ed), Dictionary of Australian Artists, OUP, Melbourne, 1992, p.584.
- Carol T. Christ addresses this problem in The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry, New Haven, 1975.
- Previously ‘naturalism’ was the term favoured by scholars for describing this form of landscape art; this now seems to have fallen into disuse.
- Susan Stewart, op. cit, pp.26–27
- Stewart, p.27.
- See also Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, London, 1989, p.67. Buck-Morss discusses the illusionary elements in both montage and panoramas because of a failure to “harmonize’.
- See Ruskin, Modern Painters, David Barrie (ed), p. 178.
- When they were first devised, panoramas were advertised as being the liberators of landscape art. However, by the early 1800s there was a growing perception of panoramas as pieces of trickery whose ‘object is deception’. See Ralph Hyde, Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the ‘All-Embracing’ View, exhibition catalogue, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 1989, p.20.
- Stewart, op.cit., p.xii.
Australian Journal of Art
Volume 12, 1994 - Issue 1: In Memoriam: Ian Burn