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Oscar Friström / Sweden/Australia 1856–1918 / Mount Morgan 1896 / Oil on wood / 16.6 x 28.9cm / Purchased 1982 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Oscar FriströmMount Morgan 1896
Not Currently on Display
Friström’s Mount Morgan depicts the open cut mine of the same name near Rockhampton in central Queensland. It was one of the more obscure places he travelled to on his explorations, and Friström has treated the scene in a manner that recalls the characteristics of the surreal. The work combines areas of finely detailed rocks and a lone tree perched high on a rocky outcrop, with a freely handled, almost unnaturally blue sky. The placement of the ladder and fallen tree that teeters to the left of the frame highlights the absence of the human figure.
Friström’s oil painting portrays a relatively empty landscape with a stark and solitary cliff-face, and it is unlike any Australian landscapes by his contemporaries.
Carl Magnus Oscar Friström was born in 1856 on the island of Sturkö off the south coast of Sweden, the son of a school teacher and a self-taught artist. Friström is first recorded in Brisbane in 1884, having entered works in the Queensland National Association Exhibition’s fine art section, and displaying paintings alongside his photographs. In 1885, he went into a partnership with the Elite Photo Co., and four years later opened his own studio in Adelaide Street. Friström exhibited in Melbourne’s Centennial International Exhibition in 1888 and, during the 1890s, was the art master at All Hallows’ Convent School, Brisbane.
Friström co-founded the Queensland Art Society in 1887 with LWK Wirth and Isaac Walter Jenner, and exhibited scenes from history, studies of classical sculpture and portraits of prominent contemporary figures, including Lady Musgrave (wife of the governor of Queensland) and several members of Parliament. Local Aboriginal figure ‘Catch-Penny’ was a favourite subject for Friström, and works such as his portrait of ‘King Sandy’ (which formed part of the 1888 Centennial International Exhibition in Melbourne) are of historical importance for their early recording of Queensland’s Indigenous people.
In 1904, Friström and others formed the ‘New Society of Artists’, and he became its first president three years later. He played an important role in amalgamating the two art societies in 1916 and, by 1918, was a member of the Queensland National Art Gallery Board of Advice.1
Endnotes:
1Julie Brown and Margaret Maynard, Fine Art Exhibitions in Brisbane 1884–1916, Fryer Library, Brisbane, 1980.