The Road Up the Hill

Arthur Streeton's 'Road Up the Hill' (1889) is a late Heidelberg School work from the year before the famous 9x5 Impression Exhibition that brought Australian Impressionism to public attention. His road subjects placed the landscape's human element — the road as evidence of human movement through natural space — within the broader investigation of Australian light that was the Heidelberg School's central project. The hill road offered compositional possibilities of ascending movement and varied landscape perspectives that complemented his more famous horizontal studies of the Box Hill and Eaglemont plains.

Streeton renders the ascending road through the bush landscape with his characteristic warm Australian palette — the eucalyptus greys and ochres of the scrub alongside the particular quality of Victorian light that was his most distinctive achievement. His handling of the road's geometry as a compositional device uses the ascending course to create spatial depth, the road diminishing into the hill providing the perspectival recession that his horizontal compositions achieved through sky and distance.