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Arthur Streeton / Australia 1867–1943 / June evening, Box Hill 1887 / Oil on canvas laid down on composition board / 55.9 x 76.3cm / Gift of the family of the late Hon. TC Beirne, MLC, through the National Gallery Society of Queensland 1954 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Arthur StreetonJune evening, Box Hill 1887
Not Currently on Display
An important early work by Arthur Streeton, June evening, Box Hill was painted shortly after the artist joined Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin at their Box Hill weekend camp. There are affinities with Tom Roberts’s Evening when the quiet east flushes faintly c.1887-88 (National Gallery of Victoria). However, Streeton worked from a lower viewpoint and instead of the panorama chosen by Roberts, Streeton selected a smaller section of landscape.
A deep pink glow suffuses the landscape, while the addition of a woman in white, wearing a fashionable hat and following some cattle home, lends the romanticised landscape an incongruous touch.
Streeton wrote of Roberts’s interest in the ‘exquisite and delicate variation in colour and tone of the eastern sky at sunset and the rosy flush of the afterglow’ seeing it as the closest approach to the Northern Hemisphere’s twilight.1
Endnotes:
1. Arthur Streeton, in Robert Henderson Croll, Tom Roberts: Father of Australian Landscape Painting, Robertson & Mullens Limited, Melbourne, 1935, p.16.
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 Questions
1. The sky changes colour according to the time of year and time of day, i.e. dawn, dusk, twilight. What time of the day and at what time of year is depicted in June evening, Box Hill? Refer to the elements of art to support your decision.
2. What techniques has the artist used to draw viewers’ attention to the eastern afterglow? Together with painterly considerations, what is the connection between sunsets in the Southern Hemisphere and twilight in the Northern Hemisphere?
Classroom Activities
Using photography or plein-air painting, capture a landscape at sunset. What colours do you see? Experiment with colour to create the effect of an eastern afterglow.