286 THE PASTORAL AGE IN AUSTRALASIA 



cally reproduced, week by week, in such Journals as 

 the Sydney Mail and the Australasian are on the 

 threshold of high art. 



If, by such interpretations of Bush life and such 

 revealings of Australian landscape, Australian artists 

 have not established a new school of painting, as they 

 once claimed, or even laid its foundations, as is now 

 asserted, they have at least set up a happy variant on 

 English landscape- and figure-painting. With much of 

 the veracity and reflective depth of English painting, 

 the Australian school frames its new scenes and novel 

 subjects in a brighter scheme of colouring than is known 

 to English art. The great legislator of Enghsh art 

 aesthetics, Sir Joshua Re,ynolds, laid an authoritative 

 ban on blues, yellows, and yellowy reds or whites ; and 

 Sir David Wilkie commended Raeburn for abandoning 

 his Prussian blues and Neapolitan yellows. The Austra° 

 lian school has adopted the French colour-scheme, its 

 reds generally excepted. Yellow and blue are dominant 

 colours in its pictures, because they are dominant 

 colours in the scenes that it paints.* As Australia has 

 produced a Melba in song, it may yet bring forth a 

 Turner in plastic art, who may find new colours on his 

 palette wherewith to paint more visionary scenes. But 

 the pastoral landscape and the pastoral life will have 

 been the base and the motive-power of the whole plastic 

 development. 



* The Nation, New York, xci. 400-401. 



