EUGENE VON GUERARD

Taken to London by Major-General Macarthur to be shown at the London International Exhibition, 1862
Leonard Joel, Melbourne, December 1960, lot 306, as 'Cabbage Tree Hill’
Arthur Bond (inscription 'A. E. Bond' on stretcher)
Clune Galleries, Sydney
Private collection, Melbourne

London International Exhibition, 1862, cat.475/5, as 'Forest scene’

The Age, Melbourne, 20 November  1860, p. 5
Examiner and Melbourne Weekly News, 26 May 1860, p. 8
Illustrated Australian Mail, 22 February 1862, unpaginated
Eugene von Guérard, Clune Galleries, Sydney, 1972, cat. 15 as 'Cabbage Tree Hill’

Candice Bruce, Edward Comstock and Frank McDonald, Eugene von Guérard 1811-1901: a German Romantic in the Antipodes, Alister Taylor, Martinborough, NZ, 1982, cat. 67 as 'Forest scene’

DRAWINGS:
'Brandy & Water Creek Palm Valley Farm James Kevan [sic] Dienstag 6 Dec 1859', DG*D17, folio 44, Dixson Library, Sydney
DGB16, folio 21, Dixson Library, Sydney

In December 1859 Eugene von Guérard undertook his one and only trip to New South Wales. After spending a few days in Sydney, he headed south for two weeks in the Illawarra district, arriving on 4 December at the Fig Tree Hotel near Wollongong. Two days later he sketched this scene when he traversed the farm of James Keevers (b. 1823), the son of one of the first settlers in the Illawarra District, William Keevers. 

William Keevers had fought at Waterloo with the Duke of Wellington and had arrived in New South Wales in 1822 as a sergeant with the 18th Hussars. In 1834 he was given a grant of one hundred acres at West Dapto near Wollongong which he named 'Hussar Farm’. By the 1840s, and with a young family – he would eventually have eleven children – he had sold the land and moved further south to the area now known as Avondale, where he and his growing tribe of sons worked the land and felled timber for the Woodstock sawmill.¹ The area was rich and fertile, with a good source of fresh water running through it called the American Creek – thus named for the three American settlers who first cleared land there – and its tributary, Brandy & Water Creek.

The painting shows a view of the forest looking north with Mount Kembla in the left-hand corner. Against this, in a device commonly used by nineteenth-century artists to lend an exotic touch to a foreign scene, are silhouetted almost impossibly tall and straight cabbage-tree palms. Here, tiny figures, dwarfed by massive bluegums, white box and ironbark, hack their way through the dense forest, burning the debris as they go. The lower slopes show a profusion of plants: red ash and cedar, pittosporum, cheesetree and flintwood, and near to a clearing that slashes through the forest on the left-hand side of the canvas, red gums, callistemon and the prickly-leaved paperbark. Von Guérard skillfully takes the viewer right in to the depths of the forest where these small fires glow amidst the damp earth and wet bracken of the undergrowth. He creates such an intense atmosphere one can almost hear the fire crackle and smell the smoke. In addition to the touches of red paint from the fires are those from the local coral tree (Erythrina x sykesii) and native cherry, all set against the rich verdure of the forest.

There are at least two, possibly three, paintings of this view, the first of which was commissioned by Peter Manifold of 'Purrumbete’, Victoria in 1860.² A second canvas, most probably the present painting, was sent by the artist with Major-General Macarthur to the London International Exhibition in 1862. A third canvas seems to have been painted in 1866 and exhibited widely – although this might be the same version as the 1862 canvas.³ It was not unusual for von Guérard to paint another version of a work if the subject was considered to be a popular and successful one – he also did several versions of Sydney Harbour from this same trip – and given that the artist again chose the subject for his book of lithographs, Australian Landscapes, we can assume he felt it to be one of his best.⁴

By 1860, the area was already famous for its exotic botany and had been painted several times by von Guérard’s Sydney rival, Conrad Martens. It had all the features that so appealed to the contemporary taste for the Romantic and was lusciously described by the artist’s friend, the art critic and writer, James Smith, in the text accompanying the lithograph:

'This sylvan scene is situated at a distance of little more than ten miles from Wollongong, near the junction of a little stream… Brandy Water creek, with the American Creek, and at the foot of a noble range of mountains. With the lofty bangalow palm, the cabbage tree palm, the gigantic wild fig-tree, and the fire tree (otherwise known as the blaze tree) with its vividly scarlet blossoms, are intermingled the nettle tree, the rose-wood tree, the sassafras, the white-wood, the wild rose, numerous varieties of the fern tree and parasites innumerable; the whole being tightly woven together in one dense and almost impenetrable mass of foliage.’

Smith was the artist’s greatest supporter and most eloquent interpreter. His many reviews were vital in helping von Guérard retain his place as the most important landscape painter of the day.  He praised this view in several newspaper articles, quoting Tennyson, Shelley and Whitman amongst others, and describing it in elaborate language that constructed it as a Gothic landscape of 'dark recesses' where all is knotted and twisted and 'touched with a weird fantastic grace'. Smith noted too, however, that the 'progress of settlement’ was destroying the very scenery that made the landscape special.

By the end of the nineteenth century much of the forest had been cleared and the eighty-foot cabbage-tree palms, gigantic bluegum and ancient figtrees removed. By then, James Keevers had given up his farm at American Creek and moved further north to Newcastle where he died in 1880. William Keevers died in Kiama in 1871 and was buried with military honours in the Anglican cemetery at Jamberoo where his gravestone records his action at Waterloo.

We are most grateful to Dr Candice Bruce for providing this catalogue essay.

1.  McDonald, W. G., Nineteenth Century Dapto: notes on the history of Dapto and its neighbourhood, Illawarra Historical Society, 1976.
2. See Bruce, C. et al., Eugene von Guérard 1811-1901: a German Romantic in the Antipodes, Alister Taylor, Martinborough,  1982, cat. 49.
3. See op. cit., cat. 112, 'Cabbage Trees, near the Shoalhaven River, N.S.W.’
4. Hamel & Ferguson, Melbourne, 1867-68, pl. XV, 'Cabbage-tree forest, American Creek, New South Wales’.