JOHN GLOVER

Mr John W. Kenny, Melbourne
Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne
Private collection, Victoria
Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne
Collection of Dr Peter Farrell AM, Sydney; purchased from the above

Panorama of Australian Painting 1818 - 1868, Studley House, Xavier College, Melbourne, 20 April - 23 April 1968, cat. 6 (as 'Moulting Lagoon, Eastern Coast Tasmania')
John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and Art Exhibitions Australia: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, Art

This work has a traditional-style ornate gilt timber frame. This painting appears to have an old stretcher but not an original stretcher. This work has been lined, strip-lined and the canvas has received wax impregnation. There is retouching along the left and right hand edges approximately 1cm in to the image. There are several minor areas of retouching in the sky. There is more extensive retouching in the middle ground lower right hand quadrant. Some retouching to the jacket of the figure and head of the dog and some more minor areas in surrounding foreground. The surface of the work has extensive but stable stress cracking and the vertical central stretcher is evident.
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The Anglo-Australian artist John Glover is arguably the most important landscape painter working outside Europe in the 1830s. The present work is a rare and important example of his Australian oeuvre, and of the 'Colonial Picturesque' style which is so closely associated with the expansion of the British Empire.

Largely self-taught, Glover began his career as a writing master and drawing master in his native Leicestershire, before moving to London in 1805. There he became a significant figure in the developing rage for watercolour, and the associated popularisation of Picturesque art and tourism in Wales, the Lake district, Scotland and Ireland. Although not a Royal Academician, he enjoyed consistent financial, critical and collegial success; he was President of the Society of Painters in Water Colours, of the Society of Painters in Oil and Water Colours and of the Society of British Artists, and was one of the first British artists to mount a solo exhibition in the metropolis.

In 1830, at the age of 63, Glover migrated to Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania), and over the next decade completely reconstructed his life and his art. He became a successful landowner and pastoralist at his property 'Patterdale' in the island's mid-north, and in his painting developed a unique vision of the Australian landscape. His Tasmanian paintings are remarkable both for acute observation – from the celebrated Glover curly trees to the dun-gold-blue palette – and for the way in which they map conventional European ways of seeing onto the alien, antipodean environment. In their clear-eyed naturalism, the paintings also convey much information about the social structure of the convict colony and about the traditional lifeways of the Palawa, or Aboriginal Tasmanians.  Moulting Lagoon... is one of only three dozen known surviving oils from this climactic period of Glover's career, one of a mere handful not held in public collections and is one of only two which depict the island's east coast.¹ It presents the view southward from the head of Moulting Lagoon, looking past Great Swanport down Great Oyster Bay. The Freycinet Peninsula with the distinctive profile of the Hazzards and Mt. Freycinet is visible at the left, while, in the centre, the coast retreats in a series of promontories made paler and bluer by atmospheric perspective as they recede towards Cape Bougainville. On the right, the land rises in a series of similarly fading hills to the summits of Mt. Ponsonby and Mt. Cartwright.

The view corresponds to that from the top of Pine Hill, the highest point above Apsley Marsh, on the property owned in the 1830s by John Lyne. One of the first settlers in the district, John Lyne eventually became a member of the Tasmanian House of Assembly, while his son (also John) later rose to become Premier of New South Wales and a minister in the Deakin and Barton federal governments.

At the time Glover made this painting, however, Lyne was still concentrating on his pastoral business interests. Having settled on what looked like well-watered grazing land, Lyne found himself in possession of what the Van Diemen's Land Land Commissioners called 'the largest swamp we have seen in the Colony...at least sixteen or eighteen hundred acres of land...a dead loss to the Proprietor...only fit for Cattle in the Summer months.'² Lyne accordingly moved up to Pine Hill, 'a long narrow slip of upland...the most heavily timbered and worst part of his farm. He cleared it at heavy expence [sic]...'³ and there he grazed his flock.

The painting was a somewhat unlikely commission; the Land Commissioners called Lyne 'a very industrious honest man possessing good means, but as he himself says, "Cannot bear to part with a shilling."'⁴ However, the complex networks of relationships and social obligation in the young colony may have prevailed over Lyne's instinctive parsimony on this occasion, there being a clear if indirect link between the two men.

Lyne had migrated to Van Diemen's Land in 1826, on the Hugh Crawford, under the command of William Langdon. When Glover sailed for the colony in 1830, it was on the Thomas Laurie, also under Captain Langdon. Langdon features in one of Glover's sketchbooks ⁵ and the artist painted Montacute' (1838, private collection) for him.⁶  Glover's connection to William Lyne through mutual acquaintance with William Langdon would have provided the incentive for the artist to make the journey from his home at 'Patterdale' over the Eastern Tiers to the coast, and for the landowner to order a painting.

Moulting Lagoon... is also significant for the light it throws upon Glover's working methods. From Pine Hill, the view is very close to that in the painting and several mountains and promontories are clearly identifiable, There are, however, marked divergences. Mt Freycinet and the Hazzards are two to three times as tall as they appear in nature. The wide spread of Oyster Bay has been compressed. The Nine Mile Beach land spit which closes the lagoon and creates the Apsley Marsh wetlands has been eliminated entirely, showing Moulting Lagoon as a wide blue estuary. Most obviously, the high bulk of Maria Island, which should rise in the centre of the picture, has been pushed back to become a small blur on the horizon. This departure from strict topographical accuracy was an accepted strategy for landscape painting in the early nineteenth century. Artists of Glover's generation would often edit or enhance the visible world, correcting nature's compositional untidinesses in accordance with the conventions of classical landscape. Both in his European and his Australian works, Glover not uncommonly distorted visible topography to fit such compositional ideals or templates. From this idealizing perspective, the convict stock-keeper with his shaggy sheepdog is simply an updated and localised version of one of Claude's Arcadian shepherds; the hazy, zigzag recession of the Moulting Lagoon flood plain in the middle distance an echo of the Roman Campagna; and the coastal mountains an evocation of those behind the Bay of Naples. Alternatively, the painting can be seen as a reprise of one of Glover's earlier, British subjects, A very ancient Ruined Chapel, Arran in the distance (1825, formerly collection Leo Schofield, Tasmania).  Having established a successful pictorial structure, the artist can apply it as easily to the east coast of Van Diemen's Land as to the west coast of Scotland.

Yet within the picture's broad vision, its generalized aesthetic, incidental details can still be discerned, and many are revelatory. For example, Mr Lyne's shepherd is wearing a short red jacket. Although the most common colours for government-issue convict 'slops' were blue, brown and yellow, there appears to have been on at least one occasion a temporary availability of red clothing. A scarlet convict waistcoat is preserved in the costume collection of the Tasmanian and Art Gallery, Hobart and in Glover's My Harvest Home (1835, TMAG) several of his assigned servants wear similar red garments. Also interesting is the shepherd's dog. In the early, hungry years of the convict settlement in Van Diemen's Land, dogs had a vital role in food gathering, as kangaroo and emu hunters. The best 'roo dogs were lurchers – greyhound crosses – and Scotch collies appear to have been a particularly favoured cross-breed. Such dogs appear with the Big River and Oyster Bay Aborigines in Benjamin Dutterrau's The Conciliation (1835, TMAG) – the Palawa had rapidly adopted the practice of hunting with dogs and maintained very substantial packs into the 1820s. In fact the dog population of the colony began to get rather out of hand, prompting the government to introduce a Dog Act in 1830. Mr Lyne's shepherd's dog should actually be wearing a collar. Finally, there are the sheep themselves. Glover's paintings of his own property at 'Patterdale' tend to focus on his bovine assets - after all, cows had been the favoured animal staffage of his English works, and he made at least two large and impressive livestock portraits of prize cattle.

However, it was wool that began to dominate the agricultural economy of Van Diemen's Land in the 1830s - by 1836 it was estimated that there were 911,357 sheep in the colony.⁷ Glover's art provides visual documentation of this pastoral explosion in sketchbook thumbnails of shearing and sheep washing, as well as in the flocks which appear in the paddocks of his homestead portraits 'Cawood' on the Ouse River (1838, TMAG) and 'Ratho' (1838, private collection).

Not having been included in the first major consignment of pictures Glover sent back to England at the end of 1834, Moulting Lagoon... can be regarded as a later work, and its technique would seem to confirm this. Like many of the artist's Australian pictures it is painted on a warm white priming layer, over which colour is applied in dappled touches of dilute pigment, so 'the effect is one of a watercolour in which the watercolour is laid on in transparent veils.' ⁸ Indeed, the treatment of the grassy area in the foreground is very close to that in the 1838 'Montacute', and a date towards the end of the 1830s is most likely.

Moulting Lagoon... is a rare and physically substantial painting by the most important Australian painter of the first half of the 19th century. It is at once typical - in its Picturesque composition, its Claudean calm and balance, its delicate, shimmering surface of oil glazes - and remarkable – in its East Coast location, its high viewpoint and its open, cleared terrain. As well as being an important work of art, it is also a priceless visual document of early European settlement in Van Diemen's Land. Directly or indirectly it constitutes a visual monument to the colonial society of the 1830s – artists, surveyors, pioneer settlers, deported convicts and displaced Aborigines - and to a million Bengal-Merino sheep.

1. The other is from further south, on the Forestier Peninsula: A View between the Swan River and King George's Sound (1831, Wesfarmers collection)
2. Edward Dumaresq (ed. Anne McKay), Journals of the Land Commissioners for Van Diemen's Land 1826-28, University of Tasmania/Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Hobart, 1962, p. 97
3. ibid.
4. ibid., pp. 97-98
5. John Glover, Sketchbook 11 (1804/1831, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales), f15v. This sketch is one of a series made soon after Glover's arrival on the Tamar in February 1831. It is probably a study for The Cataract near Launceston. Moonlight, an oil painting shown in Glover's London exhibition of 1835. The 1835 catalogue entry also notes: "The Fire Lighted by Captain Langdon as a Beacon to some lost Friends, who are on top of the Rock".
6. "Montacute" is signed and dated 1838. Langdon returned to England in March 1838, having let his properties some months previously. Glover's estate portrait was possibly commissioned as a colonial souvenir.
7. See Sharon Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania: creating an Antipodean England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 57-66
8. Paula Dredge, "A watercolour in oil paint", in Vivienne Webb (ed.), John Glover: "Natives on the Ouse River, Van Diemen's Land" 1838 ("Australian Collection Focus" exhibition catalogue), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2001, p. 7.

The above entry was written by Sotheby's Senior Researcher David Hansen, and includes uncredited extracts from his catalogue entry on the work in John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque, Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery and Art Exhibitions Australia, Hobart, 2003. We are grateful to the TMAG and AEA for granting permission to reproduce elements of the earlier text. We are also grateful for particular advice and assistance from Hamish Maxwell-Stuart and Martin Walch