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拍品专文
This large unsigned board depicting an Australian landscape, titled on the reverse, is an important and seemingly unrecorded mid-19th century painting of New South Wales. Its style and palette do not immediately suggest any of the more or less familiar artists painting in oil in the colony at mid-century, from Conrad Martens to Thomas Baines. It is here attributed to the colony’s surveyor-general Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, and the attribution must remain speculative, as we do not know if Mitchell painted in oils. Although there are no extant oil paintings by Mitchell, the date, the New South Wales subject, the careful depiction of the aboriginals and the gentle stylisation of the trees all seem to fit broadly with Mitchell’s work – both with the drawings and watercolours which survive in private and institutional collections and the drawings engraved to illustrate his accounts of his surveying expeditions published in 1838 and 1848. We are grateful to Professor Michael Rosenthal for his comments in support of an attribution to Mitchell, comments made on the basis of photographs of the present work: ‘He likes a composition with a river running through its centre and accented by trees, and he likes, too, to group figures in such a way as to suggest some narrative. His drawn figures, like these, are slight and some have those bowed heads; and they and his writing reveal an anthropological interest in Aborigines. He does drape people, and when so doing uses the rather general blanket/robe seen in your painting.’ (Michael Rosenthal, private communication, 14 Sept. 2015)
‘… His major journeys of exploration were recorded in his Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia (1848) and Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia (1848), both copiously illustrated after drawings he (and a few others) had made of the landscapes, flora, fauna, artefacts and Aboriginal people encountered. All are technical expositions, yet many of the landscapes … are tinged with a somewhat melancholy romanticism. ... Although primarily a recorder of scientific information, Mitchell himself had wider artistic interests, as was shown by a collection of more than twenty of his pictures exhibited at the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia at Brisbane in 1948. These were mainly portraits of members of his family. … In 1818 she married Mary Blunt, daughter of a general. They had twelve children. … Charles Rodius and Conrad Martens were both employed at different times as drawing-master.’ (Gael Newton in J.Kerr (ed.), The Dictionary of Australian Artists Painters, Sketchers, Photographers, Engravers to 1870, Oxford, 1992, p.541)
‘… His major journeys of exploration were recorded in his Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia (1848) and Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia (1848), both copiously illustrated after drawings he (and a few others) had made of the landscapes, flora, fauna, artefacts and Aboriginal people encountered. All are technical expositions, yet many of the landscapes … are tinged with a somewhat melancholy romanticism. ... Although primarily a recorder of scientific information, Mitchell himself had wider artistic interests, as was shown by a collection of more than twenty of his pictures exhibited at the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia at Brisbane in 1948. These were mainly portraits of members of his family. … In 1818 she married Mary Blunt, daughter of a general. They had twelve children. … Charles Rodius and Conrad Martens were both employed at different times as drawing-master.’ (Gael Newton in J.Kerr (ed.), The Dictionary of Australian Artists Painters, Sketchers, Photographers, Engravers to 1870, Oxford, 1992, p.541)