The latest exhibition opening at the art Gallery of Ballarat will highlight the work of one of Ballarat’s favourite adopted sons, artist Eugene Von Guerard.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The German-born painter spent his younger years in the first days of the Goldfields, and left an important record of daily life in the colony of the 1850s and 60s, including the magnificent work Old Ballarat as it was in the summer of 1853–54, which is in the gallery’s collection.
Eugene Von Guerard – Artist- Traveller is a major study of Von Guerard’s entire work, both the paintings and sketches done here in Australia and overseas. It has been curated by Dr Ruth Pullin and is the subject of a new book, The Artist as Traveller, which is part of the exhibition. Gordon Morrison describes the latest show as drawing heavily on the sketchbooks and drawings held in two of Australia’s great libraries, the state libraries of Victoria and NSW, and is augmented by a selection of paintings from galleries and collections across the nation.
The accompanying book is also a great testimony to both the collaborative work of the SLV and the SLNSW, the Art Gallery of Ballarat’s staff, the generosity of the Hugh D.T Williamson Foundation in supporting the exhibition, and of the extraordinary research and knowledge of Dr Pullin.
“Here we encounter in the most intimate detail the artist’s working method: field sketches, worked-up drawings and studio paintings, the last sometimes realised years after the initial field encounter,” Morrison writes in his foreword to the exhibition’s extensive catalogue.
“Author Dr Ruth Pullin has given us here an extraordinary insight into the mind of an artist whom we have come to know as the grandfather of Australian landscape painting. The curator has even pieced together the sequence of images from the so-called ‘lost sketchbooks’ — those that were disbound 120 years ago,”
That sequence of images gives us an insight into the artists evolving eye as he becomes accustomed to the new, often harsh landscape – and people – he is encountering. Von Guerard lived to be a very old man, even by today’s standards, but his works, sketchbooks and his journals are as lively and fresh as the days they were first written and drawn.
Eugene Von Guerard – Artist- Traveller will be opened by Kate Torney, CEO of the State Library of Victoria, on March 24 at
