SYDNEY LONG

This work is framed in a traditional style oak timber frame with silver painted wooden slip and appears to be original. There are no signs of any tears or repairs to the canvas. The work has not been lined and appears to have the original stretcher. There is a horizontal fine crack running along much of the top of the picture as a result of the stretcher bar pushing forward. There are a few very fine areas of cracking in the sky. Under ultra violet light there is a fine horizontal like of flaring approx 10cm long in the right hand blue sky where the fine crack is situated. There are also some scattered and very small little re-touches.
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This elegiac twilight landscape is a particularly fine example of Sid Long's 'melancholy pastoral'¹ mode.

The location has not been precisely identified. It may be an image of what D.H. Souter called 'the happy hunting ground of the painters... the Hawkesbury River, in the neighbourhood of Richmond. Every exhibition of the Art Society shewed numerous proofs of this, and any dainty bit of river stretch or study of peach-blossom was safe to be named "On the Hawkesbury."'²  Certainly Long painted at Richmond in the later 1890s, producing crisply naturalistic, expansive impressions such as Midday (1896, Art Gallery of New South Wales), The River (1896, private collection) and The Valley (1898, Art Gallery of South Australia). Alternatively, Milkmaid in the Meadow could be one of a 'series of paintings based on visits to the area around Brisbane Waters in the early years of [the 20th] century.'³

These rarely-seen Gosford/Narara Creek works reflect the artist's interest in 'the reflective subtleties of the Australian landscape rather than its "brilliancy and dryness."'⁴

Long himself said of Australia: 'I feel that this is where I belong as a painter; because everything in the landscape is so paintable. Such harmonies, and such a fascinating range of tones. Take the greens round about Sydney – there's no end to them! Perhaps you see them best in Winter... in many ways I like the Winter effects best.'⁵ However, despite this public statement of allegiance to the bush and to natural effects, Long's landscapes are very much constructions rather than simple transcriptions. In the present work we can see two of the most significant of two particular influences at work.

The first is the example of the French Barbizon School of landscape painters, and of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875) in particular. Before he ever left Australia Long would have had access to Corot's pictures, at least in black and white reproduction, both through John Mollett's The Painters of Barbizon⁶, and through the pages of The Studio magazine. Joanna Mendelssohn has noted a specific connection between Corot's Dance of the Nymphs (circa 1850, Musée du Louvre) and Long's Pan (1898, Art Gallery of New South Wales); in the present work, the links between the two artists are more general, though equally distinct: the theme of quiet rural labour; the subject of trees by water with a (female) figure; the calligraphic-painterly devices of curved branches and spotty, detached leaves. However, Mendelssohn also points out that Long 'flattened Corot's shapes and reduced them to pure decoration.'⁷

This brings us to the second influence, that of art nouveau, with its planar patterns and whiplash linearity. Aestheticism had made itself felt in Australian art and design in the late 1880s, and, reinforced by the reproductions and advocacy of The Studio, had become a well-established pictorial and decorative manner by the turn of the century. Long's own The Spirit of the Plains (1897, Queensland Art Gallery) and more particularly Pan (1898, Art Gallery of New South Wales) are among the best-known expressions of the style in Australian painting. Indeed, a caricature by Will Dyson in the 1907 New South Wales Society of Artists catalogue was accompanied by the note: 'Sid Long, born in Australia, invented much new vegetation in his time. Nature can't approach him in either form or colour when he is out to put spiral vegetation around... '⁸

In the present work the riverside trees have a lively Australian Impressionist naturalism, particularly in the play of light and shadow through their foliage, but there is an unmistakeable art nouveau accent in the several twisted, dancing trunks and in the decorative spatterings of light on leaves. Mannered, too, is the treatment of the background hills, whose vague, blurred,bruised stainings recall the artist's watercolours, or those of his contemporary Blamire Young.

This picture is the epitome of Sydney Long's landscape aesthetic in the early 1900s: elegant yet sentimental; Europeanised Australia and Australianised Europe; art nouveau à la campagne.

1. Sid Long, 'The trend of Australian Art considered and discussed', Art and Architecture (Journal of the Institute of Architects of New South Wales), vol. II no. 1, January- February 1905, p. 10
2. D.H. Souter, 'Sid Long, Landscapist', Art and Architecture, vol. II no. 2, March-April 1905, p. 65
3. Joanna Mendelssohn, The Life and Work of Sydney Long, McGraw-Hill, Sydney, 1979
4. ibid., p. 59
5. 'Sydney Long, A.R.E.: an interview with A.G. Stephens', Art in Australia, 11, December 1921, n.p.
6. John Mollet's The Painters of Barbizon: Corot, Daubigny, Dupré, Sampson Low, London, 1890
7. Joanna Mendelssohn, Sydney Long 1871-1955, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 1979, p. 5
8. Reproduced in Mendelssohn, The Life and Work of Sydney Long (op. cit.), p. 58, illus. 6