Other Popular Australian Landscape ArtistsĮlioth Gruner, seven-time winner of the Wynne Prize, produced work that was an intense meditation on the nature of light.

As Australian Official War Artist during the 1 st World War, he also painted the landscape of scenes of war. Sir Arthur Streeton, born in Australia in 1867 and knighted for his service to the arts, created paintings now amongst the most collectible of Australian art. Unlike artists such as Roberts and Streeton, McCubbin showed the more melancholy side of the Australian's relationship to the landscape, with the pioneer often depicted being beaten by the bush. He was inspired to paint Lost, his most famous work, by the discovery of twelve-year-old Clara Crosbie after 3 weeks lost in the bush. His style was probably the most impressionistic of the Heidelberg group, and he was highly influenced by his long association with Tom Roberts. A Break Away, considered an icon of Australian art, reflects a time of drought during the pioneering days of the pastoral industry, which ended in the 1890’s.īorn in Melbourne in 1855, Frederick McCubbin was the first Australian-born artist to make a name for himself. One of Roberts' most famous works is Shearing the Rams, which depicts the wool industry – Australia's first export industry and a crucial part of Australian rural life. Tom Roberts, an English immigrant working in the 1880's, painted the bush, focusing on the lives of ordinary Australian people and the triumph of pioneers over their wild environment. The mainly Melbourne-based Heidelberg School spearheaded this movement and strove to present the spirit of the Australian landscape through their work. The painting traditions of their native countries were not up to the job of putting across the unique qualities of this landscape, with its complex colours and surprising sense of the random.Īt first, artists aimed to represent what they saw as accurately as possible, but later a true Australian style of painting began to develop. He was imprisoned for allegedly supplying alcohol to Aboriginal people, and by the time he was released had lost his desire to paint and enthusiasm for life: he died the following year, aged only 57.Įuropean artists landing on Australian soil in the late 18 th Century had to find a whole new artistic language to convey the imagery they were seeing for the first time. Unfortunately, the tragedy of racial injustice destroyed Namatjira's career and life. His early works transmitted the same spiritual connection with the land as more traditional Aboriginal art, and he represented his love of trees through lovingly rendered portrait-like paintings. Namatjira’s intricately detailed watercolours of the Australian outback gave rise to the Hermannsburg School of Aboriginal art. The Australian Western Desert artists of Papunya Tula were one of the first groups of Indigenous painters, and this new arts movement formed the basis of what is now a significant and global art movement worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.Īlbert Namatjira (1902-1959) was perhaps the best known Aboriginal painter, and one of Australia’s great artists. He blended traditional use of colour with Western-style landscapes, which brought him fame and Australian citizenship – a first in a time when Aboriginal people had few rights. When a local schoolteacher introduced paints and canvas to the community, the myths and stories of the Aboriginal people were committed to a permanent substrate for the first time, reaching the West on a much larger scale. The paintings also mirror changes in society: trading patterns, the growing influence of governments and churches, and the struggle for survival.

While some works of Aboriginal art do explicitly show the physical relationship between different aspects of the landscape, the mythical meaning is always paramount. Aboriginal art was inspired by what was called ' the Dreaming '. We will follow the winding track from Aboriginal art, to the Australian Impressionists and Surrealists, to artists who pioneered a new way of seeing the bush – and finally we'll take a look at contemporary Australian landscape painters.Īustralian indigenous art, which dates back more than 30,000 years, cannot be separated from a deep relationship with the landscape. The history of Australian landscape painting is a fascinating journey through culture, symbology and the ever-changing relationship between people and land.

Amazing scenery paintings