ARTHUR STREETON

John Lane Mullins (bookplate on the reverse); thence by descent to
Miss Lane Mullins
Probably purchased from Len Voss Smith in 1976 for Mr Davies
Estate of the late John Dowell Davies AO; to the late Pamela Davies of Shepparton

Black carved timber frame, gold wooden mat. Faint vertical lines to the cedar panel, most likeley in existance when the artist painted the picture. UV inspection reveals no evidence of re-touching. In good condition.
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In 1895, Streeton was living in Sydney, mostly at Curlew Camp, Sirius Cove, but towards the end of the year and into 1896 he made one or more forays inland. Following the example of several other plein-air painters - Charles Conder, Julian Ashton, A. H. Fullwood, D. H. Souter - he headed for the country around Richmond, in the Upper Hawkesbury district.¹

Here he painted one of his great masterpieces, The purple noon's transparent might, 1896 (National Gallery of Victoria); another major Hawkesbury subject, The River, 1896 (National Gallery of Victoria); as well as a good number of his 'little rotters', sketch paintings such as Oncoming Storm, 1895 (National Gallery of Victoria); Sunlight: Cutting on a Hot Road, 1895 (National Gallery of Australia); The Australian Road, also known as The Hot Road, 1896 (private collection); and A Road to the Kurrajong, 1896 (private collection). All of these works were exhibited in Melbourne in November 1896, in the nicely-named Streeton's Sydney Sunshine Exhibition, a fund-raiser for his projected overseas trip.

While the title of the present work has not been confirmed,² it is evidently from early in the artist's Hawkesbury campaign. Not only does it bear an autograph date of 1895, but the foliage has the same scrubby pink-olive of the trees in the immediately previous Sirius Cove paintings, works such as Cremorne Pastoral, 1895 (Art Gallery of New South Wales). Whether or not it was in fact included in the Melbourne exhibition,³ it is certainly deserving of the very positive critical coverage that show received. The Age critic wrote that 'the gaiety of the color[sic] and the facility of the execution impress the spectator immediately. Nature has been rendered with the passion rather than the long patience of genius, and with a sensuous charm that, like all strong emotions, communicates itself readily'⁴, while The Sun was positively hyperbolic, claiming that 'the glow, the sense of exhilaration aroused in the mind is exactly that imparted by the great works of genius the world possesses - Beethoven's "Choral Symphony," Dante's "Divina Commedia," Shakespeare's "Hamlet"...' ⁵ The Australasian particularly noted the paintings' bright, hot clarity, describing them as 'vivid transcripts of Australian landscape seen beneath the fierce glare of noonday summer sun. The stifling heat, painful stillness, clear-cut purple transparent shadows, and high lights almost blinding in their brilliancy, are given by the artist with a vivid realism..." ⁶

The present work is such a hot picture, from a very hot season, the first summer of the long dry which would become known as the Federation Drought (1895-1901). Streeton famously recorded that The purple noon's transparent might was painted on two successive days of 108¿F in the shade.⁷ Here, the shadow of the tree beside the track is but a narrow respite from the sun, while the lone horseman bisected by the horizon appears almost as a mirage. Of course, the subject of a dusty road in the heat of the day is not a new one: there are precedents in Streeton's oeuvre in such paintings as A dusty road at Templestowe, 1891 (private collection) and At Templestowe, 1889 (Art Gallery of South Australia). In turn these earlier pictures were inspired or at least influenced by David Davies's National Gallery School prize-winning landscape A Hot Day, 1888 (National Gallery of Victoria), or even Louis Buvelot's Summer Afternoon, Templetowe, 1866 (National Gallery of Victoria), shown in the 1888 Buvelot memorial exhibition.

This fine sketch landscape is from the climax of Streeton's early Australian period. The paint handling in the dusty road and parched grasses is at once fluent and decisive. Though there is little action - it is too hot - the painting has a neat, small-scale dynamism: in the way the shadow rhymes with the line of dark, distant trees, the streaky, billowing foliage with the clouds above.

Of particular interest is the fact that the painting was once owned by the Sydney lawyer, businessman, politician and patron of the arts John Lane Mullins (1857-1939). A keen collector of art, books, stamps and coins, Mullins was Treasurer and Secretary of the Society of Artists and  President of the Australian Limited Editions Society and the Australian Ex Libris Society. For over 20 years he was a Trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, serving as President in 1938-39. The present work bears a Mullins bookplate on the reverse which is earlier than the one he commissioned from Adrian Feint in 1927, suggesting that he acquired it (possibly directly from the artist) before that date.

We are most grateful to Oliver Streeton for assistance in cataloguing this work.

1. See Jane Clark, 'High Noon on the Hawkesbury River: Arthur Streeton in the Hawkesbury District of New South Wales", in Terence Lane (ed.), Australian Impressionism, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, pp. 260-79.

2. Mary Eagle notes that the titles of several of Streeton's smaller works from this period 'underwent some shuffling' between execution, first and subsequent exhibitions, and publication in the Arthur Streeton Catalogue of 1935 Mary Eagle, The Oil Paintings of Arthur Streeton in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994, p. 93; Arthur Streeton, The Arthur Streeton Catalogue, Arthur Streeton, Melbourne, 1935.

3. It is possibly cat. 16, And the Sunlight Clasps the Earth, or cat. 22, A Golden Symphony, thought Geoffrey Smith has suggested that the latter might be Oncoming Storm, 1895 (National Gallery of Victoria), see Geoffrey Smith, Arthur Streeton 1867-1943, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne p. 114

4. The Age, 11 December 1896, p. 7

5. 'Art and Artists', The Sun, 11 December 1896, p. 14

6. 'Notes and Notices', The Australasian, 12 December 1896, p. 1177

7. MacDonald et al., op. cit., p. 117