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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Fine Australian & International Art
• Sale Date:
  23 Nov 2015 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  15
• Lot Description:
  Arthur Ernest Streeton
  (1867-1943)
  A View from the Dandenongs 1921
  oil on canvas
  62.5 x 100.5 cm
  signed and dated lower right: A STREETON 1921
• Provenance:
  Private collection of Norman Bayles 1922; Thence by decent
• Exhibited:
  (Possibly) Recent Australian Landscape by Arthur Streeton, Education Department, Sydney, 21-28 November 1921
• Notes:
  Arthur Streeton's large and accomplished A View from the Dandenongs of 1921 is a hallmark painting that displays his formidable skills, about twelve months after he returned home from serving as an Official War Artist during WWI. The present painting shows a panoramic vista from an elevated position near Sassafras; just a short downhill stroll away from Streeton's eventual home Longacres (built 1924) on Range Road in Olinda near the peak of the Dandenongs. Streeton's A View from the Dandenongs is very closely related to the equally sized and almost identical painting Melbourne from Sassafras, which was conceived and created in 1920. Given this, it seems more than likely that Streeton painted both works at about the same time (1920) or, alternatively, returned close to the same site to complete the present painting. Whatever the case, both rare paintings belong to that short period (1920-1922), before the artist returned to London - a time when his much sought-after paintings were infused with an intensely focused pastoral homeliness. Both paintings, the present A View from the Dandenongs and the related Melbourne from Sassafras, show the suffused atmospheric effects and painterly bravura that typify the best of the artist's Australian landscape paintings, fifteen years before he was knighted for services to the Arts. Sir Arthur Streeton always fervently believed that the home-grown and unique attributes of the Australian landscape could move artists and poets just as European landscapes moved English and Continental artists. Streeton acted on this locally based belief and used a sympathetic vision to sharpen his aesthetic grasp of the particular beauty of the Australian landscape, especially when viewing its airy and wide expanses at lyrical and wistful moments. The point is clear: Streeton's poetically inflected vision is what charges his remarkable paintings with their charming local accents and visual aptness. Of course, he did all this with wonderful paint handling and skill and the best of his works, like the present painting, are characterised by a light-handed deftness that is a substantial advance upon the overwrought topographical effects strained after by artists of an earlier colonial generation. Little wonder that Streeton was universally considered the most famous and accomplished landscape painter of his generation. Most scholars and art historians now agree that had Streeton lived in Paris at the time, his work would mark him out as the equal of ƒdouard Manet (1832-1883) and, perhaps, even the great French artist Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). The painting's scene looks Westward towards the city of Melbourne. Its aspect takes in Melbourne's Port Phillip to the centre left of the canvas in ways that visually balance the faint outline of the You Yang Mountains on its right. Suggestions of human habitation come in the form of blue smoke haze and a number of fire clearings and the scatter of deftly painted hints of houses and garden or farm plots. The more restrained palette that delineates the distant background has balanced the dappled effects of the verdant masses of trees on the rising slopes in the left of the foreground. The downward sweep of the foregrounded foothills of Mt. Dandenong have their shadows emphasized to suggest pictorial depth and add pictorial contrast to the comparatively flat and low lying plains of the River Yarra. Streeton's A View from the Dandenongs of 1921 is not a conventional 'scene painting' - the painting does not impose its view; rather, it coaxes the viewer's eye into the vista. Looked at in these ways, Streeton's painterly panorama, with its settled and unsettled juxtapositions, shows a remarkable compositional and technical finesse.
• Estimate:
  A$60,000 - 90,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.