.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
In 1890 Piguenit visited the west of outback New South Wales to see the devastation wrought by the flooded Darling River. His painting of the inundated landscape, Out West during the flood of 1890, the Gunda Booka Range, now in the collection of the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, Tasmania, won the inaugural Wynne Prize for landscape painting at the Art Gallery of New South Wales that year. His more successful painting of the flood, The Flood in the Darling 1890, painted in 1895 was acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
These paintings, and other similar works, paintings and watercolours, depicting floods, mark an important shift in Piguenit's landscapes. Earlier landscapes had been conventional romantic images, with emphasis on filling the picture with almost claustrophobic wilderness, either real or imaginary, including impenetrable bush, dark lowering mountains, mists and cloudy skies. These flood pictures have clear horizons and are full of space and light. Although images of devastation, the sunlight breaking through clouds with a watery silver light promises hope and deliverance.
Though not a flood painting, On the 'Break-O'-Day' Plains, Tasmania, (Sunset after a storm), 1895 undoubtedly benefits from Piguenit's experience on the Darling and his paintings of the event. The vast expanse of landscape depicted belongs to the new, more radical landscapes of the 1890s and earliest years of the twentieth century. The painting depicts the great expanse of the view on the plains of Tasmania's north-eastern Fingal Valley, probably close to Cullenswood, the home of his friends and patrons, the Legge family, who kept a room for his visits. Wreathing the distant hills in drifts of cloud and mist, Piguenit lowers the horizon line, as in the flood paintings, to place emphasis on the dramatic cloud formation of the sunset following a rainstorm, which becomes the painting's subject.
The sodden landscape painted in greys and grey-greens, with silvery patches of water reflecting the sky, is vast, and appears to stretch endlessly in every direction. This effect is further heightened by having made the distant hills, the Ben Lomond range, seem insubstantial by obscuring them with the retreating rain cloud. This low cloud breaks up higher in the sky into more wispy evening clouds tinged with the softest pink and grey of the setting sun. It is a nacreous image of a soft and wet landscape, not devastated by flood, just blessed with rain and the promise of sunshine tomorrow.
Piguenit began his working life as an assistant draughtsman with the Tasmanian Lands and Survey Department in 1850. His training and success depicting the landscape led to an appointment as official artist to exploratory expeditions in Tasmania and in 1875 to an invitation to join Eccleston du Faur's artists' camp in the Grose Valley of New South Wales. In 1880 Piguenit moved to Sydney where he achieved considerable success as one of Australia's first native-born professional landscape painters. He began exhibiting outside Australia when he showed work in the Auckland Society of Artists annual exhibition in 1877. From 1886 Piguenit occasionally exhibited in Europe and America. He was one of the first Australian landscape painters to exhibit in an international context.
We are grateful to John McPhee for providing this catalogue entry.
These paintings, and other similar works, paintings and watercolours, depicting floods, mark an important shift in Piguenit's landscapes. Earlier landscapes had been conventional romantic images, with emphasis on filling the picture with almost claustrophobic wilderness, either real or imaginary, including impenetrable bush, dark lowering mountains, mists and cloudy skies. These flood pictures have clear horizons and are full of space and light. Although images of devastation, the sunlight breaking through clouds with a watery silver light promises hope and deliverance.
Though not a flood painting, On the 'Break-O'-Day' Plains, Tasmania, (Sunset after a storm), 1895 undoubtedly benefits from Piguenit's experience on the Darling and his paintings of the event. The vast expanse of landscape depicted belongs to the new, more radical landscapes of the 1890s and earliest years of the twentieth century. The painting depicts the great expanse of the view on the plains of Tasmania's north-eastern Fingal Valley, probably close to Cullenswood, the home of his friends and patrons, the Legge family, who kept a room for his visits. Wreathing the distant hills in drifts of cloud and mist, Piguenit lowers the horizon line, as in the flood paintings, to place emphasis on the dramatic cloud formation of the sunset following a rainstorm, which becomes the painting's subject.
The sodden landscape painted in greys and grey-greens, with silvery patches of water reflecting the sky, is vast, and appears to stretch endlessly in every direction. This effect is further heightened by having made the distant hills, the Ben Lomond range, seem insubstantial by obscuring them with the retreating rain cloud. This low cloud breaks up higher in the sky into more wispy evening clouds tinged with the softest pink and grey of the setting sun. It is a nacreous image of a soft and wet landscape, not devastated by flood, just blessed with rain and the promise of sunshine tomorrow.
Piguenit began his working life as an assistant draughtsman with the Tasmanian Lands and Survey Department in 1850. His training and success depicting the landscape led to an appointment as official artist to exploratory expeditions in Tasmania and in 1875 to an invitation to join Eccleston du Faur's artists' camp in the Grose Valley of New South Wales. In 1880 Piguenit moved to Sydney where he achieved considerable success as one of Australia's first native-born professional landscape painters. He began exhibiting outside Australia when he showed work in the Auckland Society of Artists annual exhibition in 1877. From 1886 Piguenit occasionally exhibited in Europe and America. He was one of the first Australian landscape painters to exhibit in an international context.
We are grateful to John McPhee for providing this catalogue entry.