ARTHUR STREETON

Purchased by M. S. S. Earlam, circa 1955; thence by descent to the present owner
Private collection, New South Wales

Streeton's Show of the Sunlit Suburbs of Sydney, Athenaeum Hall, Melbourne, 31 October - 5 November 1921, cat. 9 as 'Golden City, from No. 4 Bridge Street'

Exhibition of Recent Australian Landscape by Arthur Streeton prior to his return to Europe, Education Department Gallery, 21-28 November 1921, cat. 13 as 'Golden City, Sydney'

Late in September 1921, Streeton spent some time in Sydney painting views of the exciting, modern, post-First World War city it had grown into during his years in Europe. There were cityscapes seen from the Town Hall and Bridge Street, as well as harbour views from Spit Road, Holtermann’s Tower in North Sydney, Vaucluse and elsewhere. This dramatic view of the city skyline has been identified as the panel he entitled 'Golden City, from No. 4 Bridge Street' when he first exhibited it in October that year. His viewpoint was 'Cliveden', the tallest building then in Bridge Street at about ten storeys.¹

In the foreground, from left to right, the buildings are the Chief Secretary's, the Education Department – where Streeton held his November exhibition – and the distinctive clock tower of the Lands Department, seen from Bridge Street. Domes, office blocks, modest ‘skyscrapers’ – more than a century’s progress – are laid before the viewer. Golden sandstone is set against a clear springtime sky and the blue of the harbour beyond, looking towards Farm Cove.

Streeton had painted a number of important city views earlier in his career. In the ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ of the 1880s, his large Between the Lights - Princes Bridge was one of the most ambitious of his early works, while a series of delightful glimpses of the city were among his contributions to the now famous ‘9 by 5 Impression Exhibition’ of 1889. In Sydney, in 1893, The Railway Station, now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, depicted Redfern Station as a hub of atmospheric urban life.² However by the 1920s his message here is energy, modernity and expansion. As his biographer Mary Eagle points out, ‘It was Streeton’s ability to select images reverberant with meaning for his Australian audience that makes his late career so significant in Australian art history’.³

We are most grateful to Alan Davies, Curator of Photographs at the State Library of New South Wales, for confirming Streeton's viewpoint and identifying the buildings depicted.

1. The buildings can be seen from a similar viewpoint in a photograph in the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, PXE 711/385.

2. See Clark, J. and Whitelaw, B., Golden Summers: Heidelberg and beyond, ICCA, Sydney, 1985, pp. 81, 159; and the current major exhibition, Australian Impressionism, at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

3. Eagle, M., The Oil Paintings of Arthur Streeton in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994, p. 155.