284 THE PASTORAL AGE IN AUSTRALASIA 



The effects of light in particular are the main concern 

 of many artists. They may well be. Hardly Greece 

 itself (and who that has voyaged in the Ionian Sea is 

 likely to forget how the splendour of the sunset or the 

 brilliancy of moon or stars is there heightened by the 

 limpid air ?) surpasses Australia in the ethereal brightness 

 of its atmosphere. 



Australian painters have been slow to realize their 

 chief asset. The earher painters knew nothing of it. 

 These, it is true, were birds of passage, and foreigners 

 at that. The pictures of Chevalier and Von Guerard 

 are said to have no atmosphere — at least, the luminous 

 Australian atmosphere is conspicuously absent. The 

 trees, the mountains, the plains, even the skies, are 

 painted heavy and dark, which they seldom are. The 

 Bush is " stern and funereal," as it was to the first 

 novelists and the first poets — Marcus Clarke and 

 Charles Harpur, whereas, in literal truth it is commonly 

 flooded with sunshine. Homesick exiles, they had 

 missed its characteristic note. The Swiss Buvelot, a 

 disciple of Corot, mediated the transition to a greater 

 veracity. As so often happens with poets and even 

 with men of science, his more ambitious works, his 

 oils, were the least true to their subjects, while his less 

 considered water-colours more truly depicted the 

 landscapes he really saw. His Bush in oils was Swiss 

 or French ; in waters, it was genuinely Australian.* 



A succession of eminent painters has made this great 

 conquest for art, and adapted their colour-scheme to 

 the high key of light and colour that is the characteristic 

 note of the Australian landscape. Arthur Streeton 

 has painted the gaiety and the lyric beauty of the 

 Bush. For him the sun ever shines under a blue sky, 

 and the creek winds beneath shimmering trees. Mr. 

 Sid Long knows the hidden beauties of the Bush, as 

 Mr. Salvana paints the shy and secret places of the 

 Blue Mountains. Mr. Ford Paterson, of Victoria, is at 

 home among the tree-ferns and the mighty gum-trees of 

 * L. E., Sydney Morning Herald. 



