Arthur Streeton

David Jones' Art Gallery, Sydney
R. Cobden, Sydney
Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney
The late Dr and Mrs D. R. Sheumack, Sydney; purchased from the above in 1956; thence by descent

Exhibition of paintings by Sir Arthur Streeton: "Landscape with variations", David Jones' Art Gallery, Sydney, April 1937, cat. 5
North Shore Festival of Arts Historic Exhibition of Colonial & Sirius Cove Painters, Artlovers' Gallery, 1963, cat. 27
The D. R. Sheumack Collection of Australian Paintings, S. H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 17 May - 12 June 1983, cat. 102

Anne Galbally, Arthur Streeton, Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1969, p. 85, (cat. 213)
Robyn Christie and Justin Miller, The D. R. Sheumack Collection, Eighty Years of Australian Paintings, Sydney: Sotheby's Australia Pty. Ltd., 1988, pl. 22 (illus.)

The work is on a new stretcher and the painting has recently been lined onto a sythentic fabric with a reversible adhesive. There are scattered small retouchings to very minor areas of paint loss across the surface of the picture. The old resin varnish has recently been cleaned and re-varnished. The work is in sound and stable condition.
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Sir Arthur Streeton enjoyed a warm relationship with another great Australian cultural international of the first decades of the 20th century, the opera diva Dame Nellie Melba. An early and devoted patron and collector, Dame Nellie opened the artist's 1914 exhibition, and later that same year Streeton spent some time painting at her house at Coldstream, in the Yarra Valley near Lilydale. While named 'Coombe Cottage', Melba's estate was described by one visitor as 'about as much a cottage as the cottages at the American millionaire resort of Newport. It is a cottage on the scale of the very biggest villa on the Riviera, and with almost the same views. She looks out onto a lovely chain of mountains.'¹  Streeton's view of the property and that lovely mountain view, titled simply Melba's farm (1914, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery) was probably painted at the time of this visit.

Melba was to remain a friend; she met the Streeton family at the Melbourne docks – loudly and demonstratively – on their return in 1920 after five years in London. Later, she introduced Streeton to the people and places around Olinda in the Dandenong Ranges which led to his acquisition of 'Longacres'; Streeton claimed that she was one of the very first visitors to the property after he purchased it in 1921.

The present work is considerably later than Melba's farm and in fact dates from five years after Melba's death. Together with the previous year's Mitchell's lime quarry (1935, Museum of Lilydale), a view of the property of Melba's father, David Mitchell, it may have been painted in some spirit of remembrance of and tribute to the land and the former landowner. Certainly it indicates a fondness for that particular part of the Yarra Valley. Probably taken from the northern end of the Dandenongs, somewhere around Kalorama, the vista is northwards, looking across in the direction of Mt Everard, Kinglake and the Great Dividing Range, with Coldstream and 'Coombe Cottage' probably indicated by the dark lines of trees and cream blocks of buildings in the middle distance.

The handling is typical of the late Streeton: broad, rapid, confident and conventional. Within a picturesque frame of foreground hills, he shows a broad expanse of summer-gold pasture dotted with occasional trees, homesteads and fencelines. Behind, the horizon is defined by a wall of blue hills, briskly constructed with a square-ended brush, while over the whole towers a stack of clotted cumulus clouds in bravura impasto. One of the 'moments of greatness'² in the artist's late work, Melba's country is both a classic blue and gold Australian Impressionist landscape and a reminder that even in the early 20th century, celebrities had celebrity friends.

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

1.  Alfred, Viscount Northcliffe (Cecil & St. John Harmsworth (eds.), My journey round the world (16 July 1921 - 26 Feb. 1922), Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1923, p. 50
2.  Mary Eagle, The oil paintings of Arthur Streeton in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1994, p. 152