WILLIAM ROBINSON

William Robinson, Ray Hughes Gallery, Brisbane, 20 August - 14 September 1988
William Robinson, Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney, 28 October - 22 November 1989, cat. 10
William Robinson - A Retrospective, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 31 August - 11 November 2001; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 7 December 2001 - 10 March 2002, cat. 41, illus. (label on the reverse)
William Robinson: The Revelation of Landscape, National Trust S. H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 11 January - 2 March 2003; Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Mornington, 28 March - 18 May 2003; University of South Australia Art Museum, Adelaide, 27 February - 3 April 2004

Lynn Fern, William Robinson, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, pp. 50, 160-1, pl. 48, mistakenly titled 'Day and Night Landscape, Beechmont', 1989 (information from the artist)
Bernard Smith, with Terry Smith & Christopher Heathcote, Australian Painting 1788-2000, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2001, p. 569,  pl. 319
Lynne Seear et al., Darkness and Light, the art of William Robinson, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2001, pp. 99, 155, illus. pl. 41
Lou Klepac, William Robinson - Paintings 1987-2000, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2002, pp. 44-45, illus.
James Watters et al., William Robinson: The Revelation of Landscape, S. H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 2003, p. 40

William Robinson turned the way we see the Australian landscape upside down. Abandoning the artificiality of centuries of one-point perspective, his paintings delight in multiple views, looking both up and down, separately focused, contrapuntal compositional complexities recalling the music of J. S. Bach. Yet they are the most harmonious of visions, sublime and witty. His Beechmont paintings affirm the antipodean, inverted view, although to the right of this painting the artist may have his feet on the ground to see things the 'correct' way! Serious art can be fun, and Robinson makes it so, his landscapes and subject pictures being full of incident, novelty, and insight, inviting smiles as much as admiration. Landscape with Sunset and Self Portrait is one of his most important paintings in this genre, in which harmony of composition expresses harmony of life, all nature at peace at the tranquil hour of sunset and approaching rest. White herons wing homeward, contented cattle graze or drink at the stream, and man stands in awe. Reverential in scale against the might of nature, the viewer's reverence is induced partially by compositional vertigo. The topography of the earth and sky unite, as do sensibilities and the everyday with the celestial. It evokes reverence and wonder through its grandeur and freshness of vision. Like the colonial artist Eugene von Guérard a century before him, Robinson sees the glory of the creator in the creation, in the towering majesty of trees and mountains, of gorges, the flight of birds linking earth and sky, the light and golden edging of the clouds. The primal landscape of the Queensland rainforest at Beechmont provided Robinson with an Eden wilderness to inspire and in which to rejoice, its wholeness expressed in the feeling of being surrounded, of being within the landscape. Twice winner of the Archibald Prize for portraiture and the Wynne Prize for landscape painting, Landscape with Sunset and Self Portrait, encompasses both, although here it is the artist of the landscape, an affinity achieved through scale and colour.