The National Gallery’s innovative exhibition “Australia’s Impressionists” is focused on the work of four talented Australian artists painting between 1884 and 1904. Three of them, Charles Conder, Tom Roberts, and Arthur Streeton, were not really Impressionists, and the fourth, John Peter Russell, while very much the Impressionist, lived in France and had become a French artist. It does not matter. The paintings are an inspiration, and the curators’ account of how art developed in Australia, that third great center of Anglo-Saxon culture, is a fascinating one. Most of the works in the exhibition have come from Australian public galleries, particularly the Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. The Australian art of this time deserves to be far better known outside Australia and particularly in the United States. Looking at the paintings in the exhibition, I suddenly had the wish to fly to Australia and see more of these artists’ work, to say nothing of the distinctive scenery they depicted.
Tom Roberts went to London to study and was so taken with the work of James McNeill Whistler that he himself painted Fog, Thames Embankment (1884), capturing that classic scene from a very low viewpoint close to the water. Back in Melbourne, Roberts gave a Whistlerian musical title to his Allegro con Brio, Bourke Street West(1885–86), which is almost but not quite Impressionist in style. The London fog has been replaced by smoke from chimneys and that distinctive Australian dust which blurs everything including the blue midday