Notes
- This essay continues and extends earlier essays of mine on the complexities and problematics of looking and seeing, of viewing and being viewed, as manifest in visual representations in the colonial period—for example, Leonard Bell, ‘To see or not to see: conflicting eyes in the travel art of Augustus Earle’, in Julie F. Codell and Dianne Sachko Macleod (eds), Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1998, pp.117–39, and Leonard Bell, ‘Looking at Goldie: face to face with “All ‘e same t'e Pakeha’”, in Nicholas Thomas and Diane Losche (eds), Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific, Cambridge/Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp.163–89; a version of this essay appeared earlier in Voices, Canberra: National Library of Australia, Summer 1996–97, pp.52–77.
- While the pictorialization of nature is hardly new, the idea for these particular framings of ‘natural prospects’ came from the advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi. According to Auckland Regional Council Chairman, Philip Warren, the aim was ‘to remind Aucklanders to appreciate the unique natural environment of their region’: ‘to point out to Aucklanders that we don't need to get away from our region to truly escape’ (New Zealand Herald, 7–8 November 1998, p. A24).
- James Smith, ‘An impressionist exhibition’, Argus, 17 August 1889.
- Re the manner and extent to which responses to, and art writings about, Heidelberg ‘school’ landscapes, in particular bush landscapes, have become conventionalized, see Sue Rowley, ‘Incidents of the bush’, in Geoff Levitus (ed.), Lying about the Landscape, Sydney: Craftsman House, 1997, pp.15–29.
- See, for instance, Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Tranculturation, London/New York: Routledge, 1992; Timothy Mitchell, ‘Orientalism and the exhibi-tionary other’, in Nicholas Dirks, (ed.), Colonialism and Culture, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992, pp.289–317; Linda Nochlin, ‘The imaginary orient’, Art in America, May 1983, pp.118–31,186–90; Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting c.1830–65, Washington/London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991; William Truettner et al, The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the American Frontier, 1820–90, Washington/London: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1992; Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia, Cambridge/Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996; James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997.
- Michel Foucault, ‘The eye of power’, in his Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–77, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1977, p.52.
- Re Australia, note, for example, Henry Reynolds, ‘The emergence of Tasmania's two colonial nationalisms’, conference paper, The Colonial Eye conference, University of Tasmania, Hobart, 3 February 1999; Ryan, The Cartographic Eye…, especially chapter 3, ‘Picturesque visions: controlling the scene’; Juliana Engberg, ‘The colonial corridor’, in Colonial Post Colonial, Melbourne: Museum of Modern Art at Heide, 1996, pp.9–24; Robert Dixon, The Course of Empire: Neo-Classical Culture in Nexv South Wales, 1788–1860, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1986, especially chapter 3, ‘An inferior branch of art: colonial topographic painting’. Note: Paul Carter, ‘Second sight: looking back as colonial vision’, Australian Journal of Art, vol.XIII, 1996, p.19, ‘The projection of recognizable features onto the hitherto unsubdued surroundings serves to neutralize, even to wipe out, the events associated with colonialism itself—encounters with native peoples, appropriation of land…’. In White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art, Cambridge/Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998, Ian McLean regards the ‘aesthetic concepts’ of the sublime, picturesque and grotesque as ‘essential to colonial culture’ (p.23), and notes that the ‘prevalence of the picturesque in Australian art during the early colonial era is usually considered evidence of a colonial and European vision’ (p.35). He cites a range of artists—e.g. Thomas Mitchell, Chevalier, von Guerard, Martens, Glover—who represented, or attempted to represent, Australian landscape in terms of the picturesque with varying degrees of success, or, in some instances, in his view, ‘failure’. His notion of the ‘failure of the picturesque’ in Australia constitutes, nevertheless, an acceptance of the primacy of the picturesque as a structuring or shaping device or aesthetic in the colonial project. Note that the rendering of Australian landscape in terms of the sublime, picturesque, or grotesque did not exclude the depiction, or documentation, of local or place-typifying botanical and geological features.
- See Bell, ‘To see or not to see’, pp.121–23. Rowley (‘Incidents of the bush’, p.16) noted, in respect of Heidelberg school bush landscapes, that the repetition and continuing circulation of conventionalized, ‘somewhat clichéd’ responses to, and readings of, paintings can have the ‘effect of rendering the paintings unseen’, and can serve to ‘“colonize” the paintings, rendering them in turn known and familiar’.
- For Earle's biographical details see Eric McCormick, introductory essay and annotations in Augustus Earle, Narrative of a Nine Months Residence in New Zealand and Journal of a Residence in Tristan da Cunha, London: Oxford University Press, 1966; Harold Spencer, ‘Augustus Earle: a study of early nineteenth-century travel art and its place in English landscape and genre traditions’, PhD thesis, Harvard, 1967; Jocelyn Hack-forth-Jones, Augustus Earle: Travel Artist, Martinborough, New Zealand: Alister Taylor, 1980. Most recently Wentworth Falls has had extensive public visibility in the travelling exhibition, New Worlds From Old: 19th Century Australian and American Landscape, organized by the National Gallery of Australia and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, 1998–99. Note, too, the use of the centre-left foreground and midground section of the painting as the cover image on Gwenda Robb and Elaine Smith, Concise Dictionary of Australian Artists, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993.
- Besides Wentworth Falls, Waimate Waterfall, near Keri Keri [New Zealand], 1827–28 (National Library of Australia) and Waterfall, Penang, 1828 (National Library of Australia).
- Elizabeth Johns, ‘Landscape painting in America and Australia in an urban setting’, New Worlds From Old…, p.27.
- For instance, the National Library of Australia has paintings of the Wentworth Falls by Charles Stanley (1847), von Guerard (1867), Stanley Leighton (1868), George Slade (1873), a print (1874) after a painting by J.S. Prout, Edward Combes (1912) and G. Hammon (undated).
- ‘An artist's wanderings in the Blue Mountains’, Illustrated Sydney News, October 1889.
- Sydney Gazette, 27 August 1826.
- Hyacinth de Bougainville, Atlas, Journal de la Navigation autour du globe de la fregatte la Thetis et de la corvette L'Esperance pendant les annees 1824,1825 et 1826, Paris, 1837, plate 15.
- Illustrated Sydney News, October 1889.
- For example, Tim Bonyhady, Images in Opposition; Australian Landscape Painting, 1800–90, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985, especially chapter 3, ‘An Aboriginal arcadia’; Christopher Allen, Art in Australia: From Colonization to Post-Modernism, London: Thames & Hudson, 1997, pp.37, 41; Andrew Sayers, ‘The shaping of Australian landscape painting’, in New Worlds From Old…, p.57.
- Further examples include Native of Wellington Valley, c.1826–27 and Mosmans Cave: Wellington Valley, N.S. Wales, No 1, 1826–27 (both National Library of Australia).
- Magda Kearney, catalogue entry, ‘Augustus Earle, Wentworth Falls’, New Worlds From Old…, p.97.
- In this respect, see my ‘To see or not to see’, pp.126–27.
- Re such British landscape and landowners’ ‘portraits’, see in what was a seminal text, John Berger on Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews, 1748–49 (National Gallery, London) in his Ways of Seeing, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, pp.106–08.
- For example, Hackforth-Jones, Augustus Earle…, p.49; Bonyhady, Images in Opposition…, p.71; Keaney, ‘Augustus Earle…’ p.97; Bell, ‘To see or not to see’, p.119, Nicholas Thomas, Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture, London: Thames & Hudson, 1999, p.58.
- Ryan, The Cartographic Eye…, p.184.
- On pointing gestures and their various functions in paintings, see, for example, Claude Gandelman, Reading Pictures: Viewing Texts, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
- Note: Paul Carter, Living in a New Country, London: Faber & Faber, 1992, p.56: ‘In longing for a “Claude of the tropics” Grey indicated how quickly he could flatten out and frame a historical space, how completely his cultural terms of reference enabled him to assimilate a largely invisible human environment to the visual enclosure of the picturesque. This was the blindness at the heart of his seeing: he mistook what the fixed eye saw for “reality”, and failed to perceive the remainder of space, ritually inscribed with ochre lines, beaten tracks, camping places’.
- See Bell, ‘To see or not to see’, note 57, p 133. For Earle's portrait of Bungaree and the lithographs after it, see, for example, Keith Vincent Smith, King Bungaree: A Sydney Aborigine Meets the Great South Pacific Explorers, 1799–1830, Kenthurst: Kangaroo Press, 1992; Joan Kerr, ‘Somersaults in the antipodes’, Australian Journal of Art, vol. XI, 1993, p.12; Richard Neville, Faces of Australia: Image, Reality and the Portrait, Sydney: State Library of New South Wales, 1992, pp.60–63.
- Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Image: Australian Painting 1800–1880, Sydney: National Gallery of Australia/Ellsyd Press, 1987, pp.17, 19.
- In respect of this see, for example, Bell, ‘Looking at Goldie: face to face with “All ‘e Same T'e Pakeha’”; Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, New York/London: Routledge, 1993.
- Bell, ‘To see or not to see’; W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘Imperial landscape’, in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp.24–27; Alex Calder, ‘Maning's Tapu: colonialism and ethnography in New Zealand’, Social Analysis, vol.38, 1996, p.14; Nicholas Thomas, ‘Tabooed ground: Augustus Earle in New Zealand and Australia’, in Exchanges: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Australia and the Pacific, Sydney: Museum of Sydney, 1996, pp.143–62. Note, too, Leonard Bell, ‘Augustus Earle's The Meeting of the Artist and the Wounded Chief Hongi, Bay of Islands, New Zealand, 1827 and his oil paintings of other New Zealand encounters: contexts and connections’, in Jonathan Lamb, Bridget Orr and Alex Calder (eds), Voyages and Beaches: Europe and the Pacific 1769–1840, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, pp.235–55. A version of this paper was first given at the Voyages and Beaches conference at the University of Auckland in 1993.
- For Frame's biographical details, see Ron Appleyard, ‘E.C. Frame's South Australian sketches’, Bulletin of the Art Gallery of South Australia, vol.34, nos 1 and 2,1972; Ian Auhl and Denis Marfleet, Journey to Lake Frome, 1843: Paintings and Sketches by Edward Charles Frome and James Henderson, Blackwood: Lynton Publications, 1977; Joan Kerr (ed.), The Dictionary of Australian Artists, Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engravers to 1870, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993, p.281.
- Frome sketched throughout his career. In 1970 the Art Gallery of South Australia purchased a collection of 152 pen and pencil sketches and watercolours from the collection of the Royal Commonwealth Society in London.
- See my ‘To see or not to see’, especially pp.118–23.
- See E.C. Frome, ‘Report of the 1843 Expedition’, South Australian Government Gazette, 14 September 1843, pp.234–36 (pagination in South Australian Archives, A269, pp.1618); and E.C. Frome, ‘Report of the Country to the Eastward of the Flinders Range, South Australia’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 14, 1844, pp.282–87.
- See Edward John Eyre, Journals of the Expedition of Discovery into Central Australia and Overland from Adelaide to King George's Sound, in the Years 1840–1, 2 volumes, London: T. & W. Boone, 1845; and Charles Sturt, Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia Performed under the Authority of Her Majesty's Government, During the Years 1844, 5, 6; Together with a Notice of South Australia in 1847, 2 volumes, London: T. & W. Boone, 1849. For Eyre's and Sturt's expeditions, see, too, Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History, London/Boston: Faber & Faber, 1987; and Roslynn Haynes, Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film, Cambridge/Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- Appleyard, ‘E.C. Frame's South Australian sketches’.
- Captain Frame, Outline of the method of conducting a Trigonometrical Survey for the Formation of Geographical and Topographical Maps and Plans, Military Reconnaissances…and the Marking of the Wasteland for Future Occupation, second edition, London: John Weale, 1850, pp.135–36.
- ibid, p.72.
- Frame, ‘Report of 1843 Expedition’, p.17 (South Australian Archives pagination).
- ibid.
- Eyre, Journals…, pp.58, 111–12.
- Ludwig Becker, ‘First report: Wednesday 29 August [1860], and Thursday 30 August’, Royal Society of Victoria Papers, La Trobe Library, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, reproduced in Marjorie Tipping, Ludwig Becker: Artist and Naturalist with the Burke and Wills Expedition, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1979, p.194.
- For Eyre and Sturt, in these respects, see Carter, The Road to Botany Bay and Haynes, Seeking the Centre…
- For Friedrich, see, for example, William Vaughan et al, Caspar David Friedrich, 1774–1840: Romantic Landscape Painting in Dresden, London: Tate Gallery, 1972; and Joseph Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, London: Reaktion Books, 1990. Koerner brilliantly explores the meanings of figures in Friedrich's landscapes, in particular the ‘uckenfigur’ and the halted traveller.
- To appropriate Paul Carter's phrase from Living in a New Country, p.58.
- Frome, Instructions for the Interior Survey of South Australia, 1840, p.8.
- For Conder ‘s biographical details, see Frank Gibson, Charles Conder: His Life and Work, London: John Lane, Bodley Head, 1914; John Rothenstein, The Life and Death of Conder, London: Dent, 1938; Ursula Hoff, Charles Conder, Melbourne: Landsdowne Press, 1972; and Mary Eagle, Oil Paintings of Charles Conder in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1997.
- Gibson, Charles Conder…, p.93.
- Ron Radford, ‘Celebration: Charles Conder, A Holiday at Mentone, 1888’, in Daniel Thomas (ed.), Creating Australia: 200 Years of Art 1788–1988, Adelaide: International Cultural Corporation of Australia and Art Gallery Board of South Australia, 1988, p.116.
- ibid; Ron Radford, Australian Colonial Art 1800–1900, Adelaide: Art Gallery Board of South Australia, 1995, p.150; Leigh Astbury, Sunlight and Shadow: Australian Impressionist Painting, 1800–1900, Sydney/London: Bay Books, 1989, p.51; Jane Clark and Bridget Whitelaw, Golden Summers: Heidelberg and Beyond, Melbourne: International Cultural Corporation of Australia, 1985, p.116.
- For the beachscapes of the Heidelberg painters see, for example, Clark and Whitelaw, Golden Summers…; Astbury, Sunlight and Slwdow…; Eagle, Oil Paintings…; Helen Topliss, The Artists’ Camps: ‘plein air’ painting in Australia, Alphington: Hedley Australia Publications, 1992. For beach paintings see, too, Barry Pearce and Linda Slutzkin (eds), with text by Albie Thomas, Bohemians in the Bush: The Artists’ Camps of Mosman, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1991; Geoffrey Dutton, Sun, Sea, Surf and Sand: The Myth of the Beach, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985; and The Beach, exhibition catalogue, with essays by Geoffrey Dutton and Juliana Engberg, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, 1994.
- Radford, Creating Australia…, p.116, and Australian Colonial Art…, p.150; Clark and Whitelaw, Golden Summers…, p.116, The Beach, p.31, Anne-Marie Willis, in her Illusions of Identity: The Art of Nation, Sydney, Hale & Iremonger, 1993, pp.78–79, questions the ‘recycling of Heidelberg nationalism’ in the Bicentennial year, and Radford's characterization of A Holiday at Mentone. She claims that the painting could be seen rather as a sign of, or exercise in, Francophilia, in the adoption of French-style bohemianism and impressionist painting techniques by the Heidelberg artists. However, she still calls the work ‘nationalist by default’ (p.80), insofar as the Francophilia could be seen as a mark of independence from things British.
- Radford, Creating Australia… and Australian Colonial Art…; Hoff, Charles Conder, p.30.
- Note Gandelman, Reading Pictures…, p.ix: ‘Doors, or at least doors as signs in painting and pictures, may also be equated with a kind of pointing gesture. Doors motion us to enter the space of the representation’.
- See David Wills, ‘Mentone’, in his Prosthesis, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, chapter 2, pp.34–65.
- The standing man looking out to sea, but for his dress, could almost be displaced from a Caspar David Friedrich painting, though he also brings to mind, even more given his style of dress and Conder's French connections, the still, standing, solitary, single male figures in some of Caillebotte's Parisian paintings of the 1870s and early 1880s—figures looking from one physical, and social and psychological space to another; from a room or a balcony to the street, as, for instance, Young Man at his Window, 1876 (private collection) and Man on a Balcony, 1880 (private collection, Switzerland). See Kirk Varnedoe, Gustave Caillebotte, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
- Note Wills, ‘Mentone’, p.43: ‘The question of who relates to whom and who is doing what to whom [is] as indispensable for a reading as it is impossible to answer’.
- See, for example, Varnedoe, Gustave Caillebotte; Carol Armstrong, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; Michael Fried, Manet's Modernism: or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996; Bradford Collins (ed.), Twelve Views of Manet's Bar, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996; Sasha Newman, Felix Vallotton, New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1991.
- Note Wills, ‘Mentone’, p.57: ‘Clearly…the painting is one of dislocation; the foreground half of the canvas is full of it’. He continues: ‘And that dislocation sets in train a movement of signification, or suspension of signification, that no effort of restitution can bring to an end’. And note Allen, Art in Australia…, p.63: ‘His [Conder's] A Holiday at Mentone…is a charming picture, but a holiday implies a temporary stay in a place, without engagement’.
- The section of the painting reproduced on the cover of Creating Australia… includes, and ‘zooms’ into, the top half of the reading woman, the lying man (but not the standing man), the elderly couple in black looking back, and the ‘views’ through the pier corresponding to the boundaries of the image these aforementioned figures ‘define’. The words, ‘Creating Australia 200 Years of Art 1788–1988’ are placed in the blue sky at the top of the image. On the stamp, the word ‘Australia’ occupies the lower right third of the image, and is placed over Conder's signature.
- Bernard Smith, ‘Painting and drawing’, The Arts Festival of the Olympic Games, Melbourne, 1956, p.18.
- Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, New York: Hill and Wang, 1974, p.16.