W. C. PIGUENIT

Private collection, Sydney

This work is framed in its original gold plaster and timber frame. There is a stretcher bar mark running horizontally across the top of the picture and a similiar smaller area visible lower right. This work has been professionally conserved.
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W.C. Piguenit should properly be widely celebrated as Australia's first native-born professional artist and one of the most interesting and important landscape painters of the nineteenth century. Yet although the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery mounted a fine, scholarly touring exhibition in 1992-93,¹ it could be said that in general Piguenit has not received the broad recognition he evidently deserves.

His career achievements are in fact most impressive. Employed as an assistant draughtsman in the Tasmanian Lands and Survey Department, he began exhibiting as an amateur in 1870, and was soon invited to accompany James Scott's wilderness exploration expeditions of 1871 and 1873. Twice a silver medallist at the New South Wales Academy of Art's exhibitions, he joined Eccleston Du Faur's artists' camp in the Grose Valley in 1875, and in 1880 he moved to Sydney. Over the ensuing years his work was widely exhibited (especially in Art Society of New South Wales exhibitions, though also in the Paris Salon of 1893 and at the 1894 Chicago World's Fair), reproduced (especially in the Illustrated Sydney News) and honoured (he gained gold medals from the 1883 Calcutta International Exhibition, the 1888 Queensland Art Society Exhibition and the 1888 Tasmanian Juvenile and Industrial Exhibition). Piguenit was also handsomely accommodated by public institutions. His Mt Olympus, Lake St Clair, Tasmania (1875, Art Gallery of New South Wales) was the first work to be purchased by public subscription for the then yet-to-be-established National Art Gallery of New South Wales. The Tasmanian Government bought six of his monochrome studies of the Western Highlands for the Tasmanian Museum and At Gallery in 1887. He won the Art Gallery of New South Wales's inaugural Wynne Prize for landscape with The Flood in the Darling, 1890 (1895, Art Gallery of New South Wales), and won it again in 1901 with A Thunderstorm on the Darling (1900, private collection).

Yet like Louis Buvelot (that other 1870s artist with a French surname), Piguenit occupies a somewhat awkward position in Australian art history, somewhere in between the topographical, picturesque and sublime landscape traditions of the colonial period (as exemplified in the work of Joseph Lycett, Conrad Martens and Eugene von Guérard) and the new naturalist and national visions of the Australian Impressionists (Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder et al). Moreover, while the 20th century increasingly pictured Australia as a 'sunburnt country', Piguenit is very much on the 'flooding rains' side of Dorothea McKellar's climatic scales. From his early, Tasmanian lake and mountain expedition paintings, with their low clouds drifting over pellucid waters, through the Sydney works of the 1880s – harbour views and river scenes up the Grose and the Nepean; from the limpid mirror of the several versions of The Flood in the Darling, 1890 to the broken-brush ocean and roiling foam of The League-Long Roller Thundering on the Reef (circa 1900, private collection), Piguenit shows himself to be a poet of precipitation, a master of moist, a wizard of wet.

The present work is a previously undescribed and unrecorded painting. Undated, it has the emerald-green grass and clotted-cream impasto of the artist's later works, and is probably no earlier than the mid-1890s. The composition – of grazing cattle on a broad, grassy plain beneath a vast sky of rain-heavy but sun-gilded clouds – is closely comparable to a work dated 1903: Thy Clouds Drop Fatness (private collection). Another comparison is also instructive – with the famous The Flood in the Darling, 1890. The overall compositional proportions of both works are similar, and both have a very similarly placed and scaled stand of trees on the horizon at the right. The artist had a close engagement with the region, not only from his 1890 field trip, but also through correspondence with a farmer nephew (who lost 'all his tobacco and a great part of his maize'² in the great flood), and with his brother-in-law Gerald Halligan, who was Chief Engineer in the Harbours and Rivers section of the New South Wales Department of Public Works and an early advocate of water conservation and irrigation.³

Piguenit was therefore very familiar with the district's cycles of 'droughts and flooding rains'. There are at least four paintings of the 1890 inundation, and one which shows its opposite, the equally recurrent drought.⁴ It is conceivable that the present work also represents Western New South Wales, the same stretch of Darling flood plain, but on this occasion in a productive season and a beneficent mood.

1. See Christa Johannes and Tony Brown, W.C. Piguenit (exh. cat.), Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 1992
2. W.C. Piguenit, letter to his cousin Fanny, 26 April 1890, cited in Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2000, p. 302
3. For a discussion of Piguenit's environmental consciousness, see Bonyhady, op. cit., pp. 301-305
4. In addition to The Flood in the Darling, 1890 the works are:'Out West' during the Flood of 1890, Gunda Booka Range; 'Out West' during the Flood of 1890, Mt Oxley (both exhibited in the Spring exhibition of the Art Society of New South Wales, Sydney, 1890) and The Flood on the Darling River (1890s, coll. Dr & Mrs W.H. Lewis) The drought picture is mentioned in the artist files at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and cited in Barry Pearce, 'Deluge of Pitiless Silence', in Daniel Thomas (ed.), Creating Australia: 200 Years of Art 1788-1988, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1988