ARTHUR STREETON

Fine Australian Paintings, Sotheby's, Sydney, 4 December 1994, lot 22
Private collection, Tasmania
The Bleasel Collection of Australian Paintings, Christie's, Melbourne, 22 March 2005, lot 7
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above

Exhibition of Pictures by Arthur Streeton prior to his return to Europe, Upper Hibernian Hall, Melbourne, April 1907, cat. 17 as 'Mount Toorong'

Work is in good condition. Sealed within frame. Surface fair, UV reveals numerous small retouchings in sky, especially above mountain top.
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Back in Australia late in 1906, from his first trip to Europe, Streeton found his paintings in great demand by collectors in Sydney and Melbourne.  In February 1907 he visited his patron and friend Carl Pinschoff, the Austrian Consul-General, staying at 'Hohewarte', Mount Macedon.  'I've had a fine time up here,' he wrote to Theodore Fink, 'plenty of fresh-air, and lovely Victorian landscape, pale symphonies [sic] in purple, blue and gold... I've painted a large one 5 feet by 3 & several smaller ones up here.'¹  The five-foot canvas was his now famous Australia Felix, in the Art Gallery of South Australia.  The present view of Mount Toorong, just west of Macedon and now usually spelled Towrong, was presumably one of the smaller paintings mentioned in his letter.  As reported by a writer in The British Australasian, two of the small-scale paintings were intended for Lady Talbot.²

It was the view from Mount Toorong, looking towards Melbourne, that the early explorer Major Thomas Mitchell first called 'Australia Felix' - fortunate Australia - in 1836.  Streeton included a number of Mount Macedon and Mount Toorong views in his very successful 1907 exhibition prior to his return to Europe.  The expansive panorama of Mount Toorong also calls to mind Dorothea Mackellar's 'land of sweeping plains / of ragged mountains ranges...' - lines from her poem My Country first published the following year.

1.  16 March 1907; in Ann Galbally and Anne Gray, Letters from Smike: the letters of Arthur Streeton 1890 - 1943, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989, p. 104.
2.  2 May 1907; we are grateful to Mary Eagle for this reference.  One on-the-spot oil sketch for Australia Felix is reproduced in Ron Radford, Our Country, Australian Federation Landscapes 1900 - 1914, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2001, p. 42

We are most grateful to Oliver Streeton for his assistance in cataloguing this work.