Arthur Streeton

Arthur Streeton (1867–1943) was an Australian landscape painter and a founding figure of the Heidelberg School, the movement that established a distinctly Australian approach to Impressionist plein-air painting in the 1880s and 1890s. Born in Mount Duneed, Victoria, he trained at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne under Frederick McCubbin. In the late 1880s he joined a circle of young painters—including Tom Roberts and Charles Conder—who worked from camps at Box Hill and then at Eaglemont near Heidelberg outside Melbourne. The paintings from this period, including At Templestowe (1889) and the pastoral studies of that era, show a response to the specific qualities of Australian light: the bleached yellows and blues of summer grassland, the haze of distance, the eucalypt-grey of bush hillsides. Streeton's palette was higher-keyed and more lyrical than his contemporaries, and his handling of deep spatial recession—wide valleys stretching into dusty distance—made him the movement's most celebrated member. In 1891 he painted the monumental Still glides the stream, and shall forever glide (Art Gallery of New South Wales), one of the iconic images of Australian landscape art. He spent extended periods in London and Europe—including a stint as a war artist in World War One—before returning permanently to Australia in 1924, settling in the Dandenong Ranges. He was knighted in 1937.

Streeton's distinguishing qualities are his response to Australian light—particularly the hot, bleached quality of summer—and his mastery of aerial perspective across wide, flat, dusty landscapes. His palette of yellows, warm ochres, silvery blues, and grey-greens is distinctively Australian in a way that the darker tonalities of his European contemporaries are not. His brushwork is fluent and confident, laying in large areas of sky and terrain with economical strokes while reserving detail for foreground vegetation. Pastoral in yellow and grey (1889) is typical: the title announces the colour range, and the canvas delivers it with quiet authority.

Streeton is one of the two or three most important figures in Australian art history, establishing a visual language for the Australian landscape that persisted throughout the twentieth century. The Heidelberg School he co-founded gave Australia its first internationally recognised art movement and trained the generation that would follow. His knighthood acknowledged his symbolic status as the nation's pre-eminent landscape painter.