ARTHUR STREETON

Mr Oliver Streeton, Melbourne
Dr Norman Schureck, Sydney
James R. Lawson, 27 - 28 March, 1962, lot 48
Major Harold de Vahl Rubin, Brisbane (label on the reverse)
Private collection, Sydney

110 Years of Australian Art, Farmer's Blaxland Galleries, September 1950, as 'Cordala Scar' [sic] ¹
Norman Schureck Loan Exhibition, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, June 1958, cat. 85, as 'Gordale Scar', illus.
A Very Private Collection, S.H. Ervin Gallery, The National Trust Centre, Sydney, 15 June - 15 July 1990, cat. 63, as 'Cordala [sic] Scar'

The Arthur Streeton Catalogue, Arthur Streeton, Melbourne, 1935, cat. 442

The great limestone gorge of Goredale Scar in the Yorkshire Dales is one of the most spectacular sights in Britain, having over the centuries inspired poets, painters, film directors and television crews. For the English eighteenth century Romantics its majestic and sublime appeal was without rival. Thomas Gray of elegy fame was far too overcome. Not William Wordsworth, who described it so:

     At early dawn, or rather when the air
     Glimmers with fading light, and shadowy Eve 
     Is busiest to confer and to bereave;
     Then pensive Votary! let they feet repair
     To Gordale-chasm, terrific as the lair
     Where the young lions couch; ¹

J.M.W. Turner painted what many thought the unpaintable, exceeded by James Ward on stupendous scale, his three and a half by four metre canvas Goredale Scar of 1814 now being in the Tate Gallery, London. Nearby the Scar is Malham Cove, a huge, high curving amphitheatre of rock and open meadows below, again inspiring Wordsworth, and more recently film makers, as a select location for Betty Grable, Diana Dors, The Water Babies and Monty Python's The Holy Grail. In September 1910 Arthur Streeton too was drawn by the spectacular attractions, staying at 'The Bucks' at Malham and painting several versions of both Scar and Cove.

The huge Scar of overhanging rock and plummeting stream has a dramatically impressive gouge of black stone rising nearly one hundred metres. Streeton painted two versions, the present work and the darker Goredale Scar (Grey), as recorded in his 1935 catalogue. Both are the same size. This version provides for the greater interplay of lights and darks, with sunlight casting deep shadows across the massive surface of the scar to heighten the drama of the scene. This is picked up in Streeton's technique of rapidly and thickly applied paint, expressing the artist's emotional as well as visual response to a scene born through an ice age millions of years before. A less theatrical mood prevails in the two oils of Malham Cove, the larger acquired from the artist by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1914. Previously, it had been exhibited at the London Royal Academy of 1911 and the Paris Old Salon of 1912. The smaller Malham Cove was purchased by the Art Gallery of South Australia in 1940 through their Elder Bequest.

Goredale Scar (Sunny) was once in the famed Norman Schureck collection, which included key works by Bunny, Roberts, Conder, Lambert, and twenty oil paintings by Dobell. Goredale Scar (Sunny) was one of his thirteen Streetons. In a photograph in the catalogue of a 1958 loan exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Schureck is seen seated in his home, walls covered with paintings, including the present work. Schureck was, as the then director of the Gallery, Hal Missingham remarked, 'one of those happy and blessed mortals who love paintings.'²

1. Gordale, 1819
2. Missingham, H., 'Introduction', Norman Schureck Loan Exhibition, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1958