We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art stands and recognise the creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.
Arthur Streeton / Australia 1867–1943 / The bathers 1891 / Oil on canvas / 31.2 x 62.6cm / Purchased 1951. Maria Theresa Treweeke Bequest / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
Arthur StreetonThe bathers 1891
On Display: QAG, Gallery 11
The bathers 1891, depicting boys swimming in a creek, presents a cultural archetype of Australians enjoying nature. Streeton, together with Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Charles Conder, Walter Withers and various artist friends, spent weekends and longer periods camping in locations around Melbourne. It was during one of these trips that this work was painted. The boys, skinny and pale, are turned away from the viewer, not heroically posed like classical figures.1
Endnotes:
1. Angela Goddard, ‘Romanticism and swimming in bush creeks’, Artlines, Autumn 2005, p.14.
Arthur Streeton was born in 1867 near Geelong, Victoria. His family moved to Melbourne, and from 1882 to 1888 Streeton attended evening classes at the National Gallery of Victoria School of Design, where he participated in plein-air painting excursions to Heidelberg.
Streeton joined artists’ camps at Box Hill and Eaglemont in the late 1880s, together with Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Charles Conder. In about 1897, he sailed for Europe, spending time in Cairo and Italy before settling in London in 1899. He returned to Melbourne in the 1920s where he lived until his death in 1943.
Arthur Streeton made a significant contribution to the way Australia imagines itself. The romance and beauty of his landscapes reflect the vision of Australian art at the turn of the twentieth century and highlight the importance of rural life and landscapes in this nation’s experience.
Streeton was seen as the hero of an ambitious beginning for Australian art, one that assumed it could discard conventional European art styles.
I want to be painting every day . . . I picture in my head the Murray and all the wonder and glory at its source up toward Koscuisko [sic] . . . and the great gold plains, and all the beautiful inland Australia and I love the thought of walking into all this and trying to expand and express it in my way.[1]
While this ambition established new pictorial forms, its impetus for a national art never wholly discarded imported methods of responding to the landscape, especially aspects of European Romanticism.
Discussion Question
1. List five adjectives to describe the qualities of the Australian bush in Streeton’s The bathers. Explain your choices.
2. Identify heroic bathing figures depicted in artworks from other historical and cultural contexts, such as Pablo Picasso’s Les baigneurs (The bathers). In contrast, why do you think Streeton has chosen everyday people as subjects for his painting?
Classroom Activities
Imagine these boys are characters in a story. Create a storyboard illustrating the course of events leading to the arrival of these boys at this place. How will the story develop?