CONRAD MARTENS

Mary E Foley
By descent to her sister Mrs Raynor
Gift to her friend Mrs Wells; thence by descent to the present owner
Private collection, Melbourne

Work is mounted and framed under glass. Condition is fair, some paper discolourant and pigment fading. Slight bleeching upper right; UV examination reveals abrasion at centre.
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Conrad Martens was the only free professional painter to settle permanently in Sydney during the first half of the 19th century. Having studied under the watercolourist Copley Fielding (1787-1855), Martens left England in 1832, initially working as an artist on the ships Hyacinth and Beagle (the latter with Robert FitzRoy and Charles Darwin). Following short sojourns in South America, Tahitii and New Zealand, he arrived in Sydney in 1835. He was to remain in Australia for the rest of his life – another forty-three years. Martens was immediately successful, quickly building a large and fashionable clientele for his Picturesque harbour views and house portraits, painted both in oil and in watercolour.  However, the depression of 1843 had its impact on culture, and Martens only just managed to survive as an artist for the rest of the decade. Nevertheless, at the end of 1851 he invested in a bold venture: a five-month sketching excursion to Brisbane and the Darling Downs, returning to Sydney via the New England and Hunter River districts. The strategy was successful – the pastoralists he visited during this journey and at whose properties he made sketches were to become a valuable new source of patronage, continuing to commission and purchase works as late as the 1870s. 

Martens recorded having made about seventy watercolours from the Queensland expedition, and some thirty are known. Most of these were worked up later from field sketches, and date from circa 1852-54. While Martens' meticulous records, the survival of many of his drawings and the thorough scholarship of J.G. Steele1 have permitted a close reconstruction of the artist's travels through Queensland, the property in the present work has not yet been positively identified. The landscape and homestead architecture bear some resemblance to Patrick Leslie's 'Goomburra', and there may be a further connection in the figure of the Aboriginal walking beside the horseman – while Martens made few images of Indigenous Australians on the trip, he sketched a 'Blacks' Camp at Gladfield' on 29 December 1851, the day immediately following his departure from 'Goomburra'. Alternatively, the work could possibly depict another Leslie family property, Canning Downs, with the two side wings being Martens' imaginative projection of the planned stables, not yet built at the time of his visit. Unfortunately, the early history of the work is unclear, though it was evidently in the hands of Mary Foley, a journalist and columnist for The Observer, Brisbane, early in the 20th century.

In one of her articles Foley reminisces about her childhood, and mentions 'our Queensland home perched high in a fold of hills overlooking the green valley watered by Christmas Creek.'² However, this location is somewhat to the east of Martens' known track, and the homestead in the picture is certainly not 'perched high.' Nevertheless, a Queensland origin can be safely assumed. Not only is the drawing entirely consistent with Martens' work of this period, but so is the topography consistent with that of the Darling Downs. The British social reformer and journalist Beatrice Webb, visiting Australia some decades later, described the Downs landscape in terms that could well serve as a description of the present work:

'The country has a sort of sickly beauty; wide stretches of undulating plain scattered over with the shapeless and colourless gum tree; now and again the plain rising into low ranges of formless hills; the scattered trees taking to themselves in the distance, the air of a true forest spreading over hill and dale... And though distance, in a beautiful sunlit atmosphere lends achievement, the views would be much more attractive if one did not know that when one "got there" one would find the same parched grass underneath the sparsely scattered, shapeless and colourless gum trees. The charm of the country lies in the sun and the wonderful blue sky, added to the consciousness of magnificent distances.'³

1. J.G. Steele, Conrad Martens in Queensland: The Frontier Travels of a Colonial Artist, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1978
2. Mary E. Foley, Life's Light and Shade, the author, Melbourne, c.1940, p. 77
3. Beatrice Webb, Diary entry for 29 September 1898, quoted in Maurice French (ed.), Travellers in a Landscape: Visitors' Impressions of the Darling Downs 1827-1954, University of Southern Queensland Press, Toowoomba, 1994, p. 254