The poetry and portraiture of a national landscape: the 1913 Federal Capital site landscape competition

Notes

• I would like to thank Margaret Maynard and Nancy Underhill for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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• This committee, consisting of the Prime Minister, the President of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Vice-President of the Federal Executive Council and the opposition leaders in both houses, had been formed by Prime Minister Andrew Fisher on 28 December 1911 as ‘a Committee of consultation and advice in reference to the expenditure of votes for historic memorials of representative men’ (‘Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, no.97, Saturday 30 December 1911, p.2393; see also M. Steven, ‘An historical note 1901–1982’, in J. Mollison and L. Murray (eds), Australian National Gallery: An Introduction, Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1982, pp.10–16.
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• A. Fisher, ‘Notice to landscape artists’, Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, no. 80, 21 December 1912, p.2639.
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• ibid.
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• W. Moore, The Story of Australian Art from the Earliest Known Art of the Continent to the Art of To-Day, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, (originally published 1934) 1984, vol.1, p.133.
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• For information about the establishment of the committee on 21 August 1912, see Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, no.54, 24 August 1912, p.1454; see also Steven, ‘An historical note…’, pp.10–12.
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• R. Pegrum, The Bush Capital: How Australia chose Canberra as its Federal City, Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1983.
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• W. Gilpin, ‘On picturesque beauty’, in Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape: to which is added a poem, On Landscape Painting, London: 1792, p.3.
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• See K. Heckenberg, ‘The aesthetics and iconography of a national landscape: a study of the Canberra landscape’, honours thesis, Department of Art History, University of Queensland, 1990.
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• ‘The site of Australia's capital city’, Sydney Mail, 6 August 1913, p. 18. Hugh Paterson (1856–1917) was a Scottish-born and educated painter who came to Victoria in 1872 (see H.J. Gibbney and A.G. Smith (eds), A Biographical Register 1788–1939, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1987, vol.11, p.167).
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• See P. Haynes, The Site for the Federal Capital. Two Landscapes from the Historic Memorials Collection, Parliament House, Canberra, Canberra: Joint House Department, Parliament House, exhibition catalogue, 1993, unpaginated.
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• Moore, The Story of Australian Art, vol. 1, pp.94, 96,117,119,162 and vol.11, pp.163,164, 195–96; J. Fenton-Smith, ‘Lister, William Lister’, in B. Nairn and G. Searle (eds), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1986, vol.10, p.117; ‘Lister, William Lister’ in A. and S. McCulloch, Encyclopedia of Australian Art, revised edition, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994, p.432. See also Anon., ‘Representative artists. Mr. Wm. Lister Lister’, Australasian Art Review, vol.1, no.10, 1 December 1899, pp.9–10; ‘Cigarette’, ‘Australian painters. II.—W. Lister-Lister’, Red Funnel, vol.3, no.1, 1 August 1906, pp.31–34; G.A.T., ‘Australia—the land of sunshine: the man who has grandly recorded its glory: William Lister-Lister’, Commonwealth Home, vol. XXXII, no.929, 4 December 1925, pp.14–15; B. Stevens, ‘W. Lister Lister’, Art in Australia, vol.1, no.3, 1917, unpaginated; Lister Lister Memorial Exhibition, Sydney: National Art Gallery of New South Wales, exhibition catalogue, 1946, unpaginated [this includes two pages of biography by C.B.M. dated July 1946]; Six Reproductions of Australian Water Colour Seascapes, by W. Lister Lister, President of the Royal Art Society, date unknown, set of prints.
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• Moore, The Story of Australian Art, vol.1, pp.87 and 103; also p.193 and vol.11, p.162; see also Q., ‘Penleigh Boyd’, Art in Australia, no.7,1919, pp.26–27; J. MacDonald, The Landscapes of Penleigh Boyd (with a ‘Foreword’ by Hugh Grant Adam, M.A.), Melbourne: Alexander McCubbin, 1920; P. Serle, ‘Boyd, Theodore Penleigh’, Dictionary of Australian Biography, Sydney/London: Angus and Robertson, 1949, vol.1, pp.103–04; H. McDonald, ‘Penleigh Boyd and the 1923 exhibition of modern European art’, Art and Australia, vol.25, no.4, Winter 1988, pp.506–11; entry in A. and S. McCulloch, Encyclopedia of Australian Art, pp.106–07; and P. Dobrez, ‘The Boyds: a post-colonial retrospective’, Australian Journal of Art, vol. X, 1992, pp.81–103.
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• Moore, The Story of Australian Art, vol.1, p.116.
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• Argus, 12 July 1913, p.18.
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• Haynes, Site for the Federal Capital, unpaginated: William Nicholls Anderson (1873–1927), Theodore Penleigh Boyd (1890–1923), Theo Brooke-Hansen (1870–1945), Robert Charles Given Coulter (1864–1956), James Ranalph Jackson (1882–1975), William Lister Lister (1859–1943), Louis Frederick McCubbin (1890–1952), A.E. MacDonald, W.J.S. Percival and Harold Septimus Power (1877/8–1951).
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• A. and S. McCulloch note that Anderson ‘painted in the manner of the Heidelberg School painters’ (Encyclopedia of Australian Art, p.43). For Jackson, see Moore, The Story of Australian Art, vol.1, pp.83, 98, 119,164–65, 193, 224 and vol.11, pp.189–90; A. and S. McCulloch, Encyclopedia of Australian Art, p.367; and Jacqueline Jackson, James R. Jackson. Art was his life…, Sydney: Bay Books, 1991. For McCubbin, see Moore, The Story of Australian Art, vol.1, p.159 and vol.11, pp.198–99; the entry by A. Gray, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol.10, pp.243–14; and A. and S. McCulloch, Encyclopedia of Australian Art, p.446.
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• Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, R. R. Wark (ed.), New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1975, p.252.
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• ibid, (Thirteenth Discourse, 1786), pp.232–33.
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• ibid, pp.237–38.
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• ibid, (Fourteenth Discourse), pp.257–58.
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• A. Bermingham, ‘Reading Constable’, Art History, vol.10, no.1, March 1987, pp.38–58.
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• ibid, p.51.
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• R. B. Beckett (ed.), John Constable's Discourses, Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, vol. XIV, 1970, p.39 (from ‘Lecture I: The origin of landscape’).
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• ibid, p.65 (from Lecture III: ‘The Dutch and Flemish schools’).
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• ibid, p.9 (from ‘Introduction’ to Various Subjects of Landscape, Characteristic of English Scenery, Principally Intended to Display the Phenomena of the Chiar'oscuro of Nature: from pictures painted by John Constable, R.A., London: 1833).
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• Bermingham, ‘Reading Constable’, pp.38–39.
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• J. Ziff, ‘“Backgrounds, introduction of architecture and landscape”: a lecture by J.M.W. Turner’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol.26, 1963, p.133; see also p.131.
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• W. Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, P.P. Howe (ed.) (after the edition of A.R. Waller and A.Glover), London/Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930, vol.4, p.75.
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• ibid, p.76.
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• ibid.
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• ibid, n.1, p.76.
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• J. Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (eds), London: George Allen and New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904, vol. V (Modern Painters, 1856, vol.III), p.41; see also chapter 1, ‘Of the received opinions touching the “grand style’”, pp.17–34.
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• ibid, p.42.
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• ibid, p.64.
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• ibid, p.353. For Ruskin, Constable's works were lacking in drawing skills and recognition of the higher aspects of nature; he painted ‘great-coat weather, and nothing more’ (Ruskin, The Works…, vol. III, p.191).
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• This is the pseudonym adopted by the critic James Green (A. McCulloch, Encyclopedia of Australian Art, Melbourne: Hutchinson, 1984, vol.1, p.277).
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• J.G. De Libra, ‘The poetry of our painting. The Sydney art exhibitions’, Australasian Art Review, vol.1, no.7, 1 September 1899, p.1.
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• ibid, p.6.
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• ibid.
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• ibid, p.2.
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• ibid.
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• See I. McLean, ‘Under Saturn: melancholy and the colonial imagination’, in N. Thomas and D. Losche (eds), Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp.131–62 where it is argued that melancholy has been ‘a dominant trope in explaining Australian identity and culture’ (p.136); I thank Rex Butler for this reference. See also I. McLean, White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, especially pp.18–33, 54–61.
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• De Libra, ‘The poetry of our painting’, p.3.
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• ibid, p.4.
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• ibid, p.5. A.J. Daplyn included this painting along with five others by Lister Lister in his book, Landscape Painting from Nature in Australia: A Manual for the Student in Oil and Water Colours, Sydney: W.C. Penfold, 1902; see comments pp.65–67. For another commentary on Australian art, see J.R. Ashton, ‘An aim for Australian art’, Centennial Magazine, vol.1, no.1, 1 August 1888, pp.31–32 where powers of selection are judged to be most important; it is the artist who is able to discern the beautiful and poetic in the everyday.
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• J.F. Williams, The Quarantined Culture: Australian Reactions to Modernism 1913–1939, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.20–22, 69–74, 76. However, there was a reaction to the war of 1914–18 that resulted in an entrenchment of conservatism in the art world. For the conflicting attitudes evident in 1913, see Williams, The Quarantined Culture…, chapter 2, 1913: A year of golden plums’, pp.36–59 and chapter 3, 1913: Nowadays we are most of us Nietzscheans’, pp.60–79; compare M. Plant, ‘The lost art of federation: Australia's quest for modernism’, Art Bulletin of Victoria, no.28, 1987, pp.111–29 where less recognition is given to the impact of the war. The judgments made subsequently about the nature of Australia, its landscape and the types of landscape paintings that best captured it, most notoriously J.S. MacDonald's suggestion that Streeton's ‘major canvasses’ ‘point to the way life should be lived in Australia, with the maximum of flocks and the minimum of factories’, should be interpreted with this in mind (J.S. MacDonald, ‘Arthur Streeton’, Art in Australia, third series, no.40, 15 October 1931, p.22. See also F. McCubbin, ‘Some remarks on the history of Australian art’, The Art of Frederick McCubbin, Melbourne/Sydney: Lothian, 1916, pp.82–95; ‘E.A.V.’ [Edward A. Vidler], “The prose and poetry of Australian landscape’, Art and Letters: Has- sell's Australian Miscellany, E. A. Vidier (ed.), Adelaide/Melbourne: The Hassell Press, 1922, p.2 (but note the comments on p.4 that suggest that the appearance of the country has been captured already, but not its ‘spirit’); Moore, The Story of Australian Art, vol.1, chapter 3, ‘The Australian school of landscape painters’, especially p.85 where space and the typical colour scheme of ‘blue and gold’ are suggested as the characteristics of Australia. Compare the more tentative comments of J.G. De Libra in ‘The fine arts in Australasia. Their progress, position, and prospects’, Australasian Art Review, vol.1, no.3, 1 May 1899, pp.17–23, and “The fine arts in Australasia. Their progress, position, and prospects. No. 4’, Australasian Art Review, vol.1, no.6, 1 August 1899, pp.22–29; plus D.H. Souter, ‘Edward Officer, a painter of the back-blocks’, Art and Architecture, vol. V, no.2, March-April 1908, pp.56–62. See also I. Burn, National Life and Landscapes: Australian Painting 1900–1940, Sydney/London: Bay Books, 1990, p.29.
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• For comment on contemporary landscape, see Plant, ‘The lost art of federation…’, pp.111–29; and Burn, National Life and Landscapes, especially pp.38–50.
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• Kathleen Nicholson points out that this seems the most ‘static’ time of day (‘Naturalizing time/temporalizing nature: Turner's transformation of landscape painting’, in Glorious Nature: British Landscape Painting 1750–1850, New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Denver Art Museum, exhibition catalogue, 1993, p.40).
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• ‘The Royal Art Society’, Sydney Mail, 3 September 1913, p.19; the picture is illustrated on p.18.
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• ‘Third annual report of the High Commissioner of the Commonwealth in the United Kingdom’, Commonwealth Parliamentary Papers, vol.11,1913, pp.1211, 1215.
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• ‘Second annual report of the High Commissioner of the Commonwealth in the United Kingdom’, Commonwealth Parliamentary Papers, vol.III, 1912, Appendix C, p.26.
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• See Plant, “The lost art of federation…’, pp.111–25.
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• G. Smith, Arthur Streeton 1867–1943, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, exhibition catalogue, 1995, p.61; see discussion pp.60–61.
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• A. Galbally and A. Gray (eds), Letters from Smike: The Letters of Arthur Streeton 1890–1943, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp.12–13; see also M. Eagle, ‘The Mikado syndrome: was there an orient in Asia for the Australian “impressionist” painters?’, Australian Journal of Art, vol. VI, 1987, pp.45–63.
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• ‘Art and artists’, Table Talk, 10 May 1889, p.6. See also Smith, Arthur Streeton, pp.28–29 and the extensive bibliography cited there.
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• It was cited by Tom Roberts (‘Letter to the editor. Titian's life and works’, Argus, 30 November 1892, p.7) and by John Longstaff (in’ A returned Australian artist. Chat with Mr. John Longstaff’, Argus, 29 June 1895, p.4).
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• It was illustrated in the catalogue for the Winter Exhibition, Victorian Artists’ Society, Melbourne, 4 May 1889, no.15; a sketch engraving was also included in the Centennial Magazine, July 1889, p.884. It was also loaned to the ‘Exhibition of Australian art in London’ held at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1898: Smith, Arthur Streeton, p.28; Smith notes that an illustration was included in Magazine of Art, May 1898, but I have not been able to find such an illustration.
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• It belonged to the artist, John Llewelyn Jones (active c.1880–1924) (Smith, Arthur Streeton, pp.26–27); see also, G. Auty and P. Corbally Stourton, John Llewelyn Jones: Australia's Forgotten Painter, Sydney: Corbally Stourton Contemporary Art, 1998.
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• T. Smith, ‘Pastoral’, Creating Australia: 200 Years of Art 1788–1988, Adelaide: International Cultural Corporation, in association with the Art Gallery of South Australia, exhibition catalogue, 1988, p.102.
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• But detail alone was not enough to win the competition. Among the unsuccessful pictures, the one by Theodore Brook-Hansen (for information about the artist, see the entry in A. and S. McCulloch, Encyclopedia of Australian Art, p.115) is a very detailed depiction of the landscape, painted in darker tones (the painting is in the collection of the Canberra Museum and Art Gallery and can be viewed at the ACT Legislative Assembly); another example of an unsuccessful work (also in this collection) is the flat and brightly coloured painting by Æ. MacDonald, which features a horse and rider and sheep; for information concerning the whereabouts of these paintings at the time of writing this article, I thank Jane Carter. Charles Coulter probably also produced a detailed picture; he was an architect who knew the topography of the Canberra site intimately since he was responsible for the cycloramic view of Canberra, lithographs of which were supplied to the various contestants in the competition for the plan for the Federal City. He was also involved in designing a plan (produced in association with W. Scott Griffiths and Charles Henry Caswell (see J.W. Reps, Canberra 1912: Plans and Planners of the Australian Capital Competition, Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 1997, pp.294–96, 411. Coulter had earlier painted a watercolour picture of a possible Federal Capital on the edge of Lake George (Reps, Canberra…, fig.23, p.52).
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• Lone Hand, vol. IV, no.4, September 1915, p.251.
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• Two very enthusiastic commentaries are: ‘Cigarette’, Red Funnel, vol. 3, no.1, 1 August 1906, pp.31–34; and G.A.T., Commonwealth Home, vol. XXXII, no. 929, 4 December 1925, pp.14–15. Compare A.L. Baldry, ‘Art from Australia’, Magazine of Art, 1898, p.383; and Stevens, ‘W. Lister Lister’, unpaginated: Stevens comments, ‘His work is realistic, with at times the fidelity and disadvantages of a photograph.’
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• MacDonald, Landscapes of Penleigh Boyd, unpaginated.
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• Smith, Arthur Streeton, pp.128–29.
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• I. Burn, ‘Beating about the bush: the landscapes of the Heidelberg school’, in A. Bradley and T. Smith (eds), Australian Art and Architecture: Essays presented to Bernard Smith, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980, pp.83, 94.
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• See, for example, ‘“An ideal site”. Romance and panorama’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 September 1908, p.9.
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• ‘The site that Australia selected for its capital: a general view taken a few days ago’, Sydney Mail, 12 March 1913, p.13. Compare also the Lister Lister and Boyd pictures with the panoramic photograph of the Canberra plain with Black Mountain in the background which was part of the information prepared for the contestants in the Federal Capital plan competition (L. Gillespie, Canberra 1820–1913, Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1991, plate 199, pp.238–39).
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• ‘Jervis Bay—Sydney's proposed rival’, Bulletin, 3 December 1908, p.6.
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• ‘The name is “Canberra”. Federal capital ceremony. Great gathering of officials. Lady Denman as sponsor. Oration by the Governor-General’, Argus, 13 March 1913, p.13.
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• ‘Canberra and an American critic’, Sydney Mail, 6 August 1913, p.27.
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• A description by the Hon. Austin Chapman, M.H.R., ‘Canberra for the tourist’, Guide to Yass District, Yass: Yass and District Chamber of Commerce, 1921, p.121.
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• Both paintings were hung in the main hall of the provisional Parliament House from its opening in 1927 until 1988 when the new Parliament House building was completed; they are now displayed in that building.
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