At Templestowe

Arthur Streeton's At Templestowe (1889) depicts the Yarra River at Templestowe — a bend in the river upstream from Melbourne where the valley was still relatively rural and where the Heidelberg group found characteristic subjects. By 1889 Streeton was fully in command of the plein air technique that would make him the defining painter of Australian landscape — the bleached ochre and blue-white palette, the flat recession of river and floodplain, the specific atmospheric quality of the Australian bush near water. At Templestowe exemplifies this mature vision at its purest.

Streeton renders the Templestowe Yarra with his most assured handling: the flat river surface reflecting pale sky, the gum-tree covered banks providing vertical incident, the specific quality of Australian summer light bleaching color from the landscape. His palette is characteristically reduced — pale ochres, blue-whites, the grey-green of eucalyptus — with tonal rather than chromatic variation creating spatial recession. Brushwork is confident and economical, each stroke placed to convey both visual impression and painterly quality.