In his 89 years, he travelled the world, but never far enough to satisfy his enquiring mind; he drew, wrote and painted copiously, but still yearned for new subjects.

Von Guerard’s journeys are the subject of the latest exhibition at The Art Gallery of Ballarat, in partnership with the State Library of Victoria.

Eugene Von Guerard: Artist-traveller is a major examination of the artist’s life curated by the prominent art historian and Von Guerard specialist Dr Ruth Pullin.

She has written a book, The artist as traveller: the sketchbooks of Eugene von Guerard, which revisits the paintings of the artist in the light of his extraordinarily detailed sketchbooks.

Dr Pullin postulates that his first three Australian sketchbooks (Von Guerard arrived here seeking gold in 1852 and made Australia his home for the next 30 years) were cut up to make art works. She points out tiny drawings in the current exhibition which have traces of Old German writing around them.

Dr Pullin spoke at length with Caleb Cluff.

CC: I've read his journals. He was fully engaged in the life of the colony. He was a bit wild.

RP: “Certainly the diary that we have from his time on the goldfields is so colourful. All the different events that he sees, the way he describes the people. I think what you see is his intense curiosity about the world around him.

“He's not just focused on what he's doing. He's intrigued by the behaviour of other diggers who are fighting, or he's interested to know what's being stocked in the shop. He's really interested in every aspect of the world around him, and one of the interesting things about the goldfields diary is we only know it from an English translation.

“We don't have the original diary notes, but we do now know that he kept that diary on the back pages of his goldfield sketchbooks. And in this exhibition we have little fragments from that original diary. So there are some unseen things in this show.”

Tiny fragments of his writing? 

“Von Guerard's first three Australian sketchbooks have always been counted among the books that are missing. He produced 47 sketchbooks in his lifetime; 35 are known. But there are tiny drawings in the state Library of Victoria that I argue have come from two of those missing sketch books and these minute drawings are from the sketchbook that he used on board the ship on the voyage out.

“Obviously whoever cut this book up, cut those little fragments out because there were drawings on them, but if we turn them over the text continues on the other side.”

Are his sketches better than his paintings?

“I think what people will find when they come into the exhibition is there's a real diversity in his drawing style. We have one case where we have four different sketchbooks. In one of them we see the precise drawing is tiny, finely sharpened pencil, absolutely precise, but the way he uses the pencil and leaves the blank paper, it's a beautiful airy drawing.

“But in others you'll see wash drawings that are loose and free and atmospheric. I think the difference between the paintings and the drawings is with the drawings you're looking at those very first marks on paper, that first response to a subject. They are more personal; they are more direct. And I think he is a great draughtsman, so they are very beautiful.

“I think when people come to look at the tiny little sketches he did on the goldfields, and the larger drawings as well, you'll see that he's so specific about the gum trees. Even at that stage he's differentiating between a messmate or a manna gum.

“You can see the difference in the eucalypt, but you also see his observation of things like sections of bark that have been removed, where the diggers have removed the bark perhaps to use for a building. Even when things look quite ugly he's recorded that. He obviously wouldn't have realised how significant that information is for environmentalists today, to see what actually happened – how quickly the land was cleared.”

It’s not romanticised.

“It’s not. He's already 41: he's an experienced artist, he's studied in Dusseldorf, he's travelled in Rome, he's met really important artists, he's already got a very strong eye. So I think when he's deciding on his subject, he positions himself in such a way so he's going to gauge a satisfying composition, it’s not just documentation, the way that perhaps an illustrator would document something.

“He's documenting with an artistic eye, so that often the composition for final work is already well and truly established in that sketchbook. You can imagine he would have walked around the site and found which view is going to work.”

There’s a painting of diggers meeting some Indigenous people in the exhibition. Is that imagined or from life?

“I think it is (from life). In the diary he talks about being on the road to the diggings and stopping near the Moorabool River, and he talks about an exchange with a group of the local Aboriginal people, Wautharong people, and the possum-skin cloak (in the picture) is described, that whole incident is described.

“So we don’t have a drawing of this composition but he probably did sketch something there and he certainly records that moment.”

He's got the blackboy grasses and the tiny wildflowers and little lizard crawling up on the on the log. Such attention to detail.

“You feel this when you're reading the diary. This must have been just so exciting and so different. He's really been off the ship a matter of two to three weeks – so seeing that lizard, seeing that grass tree, would have been so exotically different to him. It would have been intriguing.”

Von Guerard went back to Germany, didn’t he?

“He did. He went back to Germany in 1882, with his wife and daughter. That story is told at the end of the exhibition, the journey home. He is still passionately wanting to see new countries, desperately wanting to get off the ship in Egypt because he wants to see the pyramids and how people live, but unfortunately they couldn’t. 

“The (ship’s)yellow flag (was flying) because there was a suspected case of cholera, and he couldn't get off the ship. They visit Sicily and retrace his steps, the journey he had made as a young man, and go up through Italy; back in Dusseldorf by the middle of the year, and he lives there until 1891.

“The last decade is spent in England, and there are seven gorgeous little sketch books from that era, from that part of his life which never been shown before. I think it was his way of interpreting the world around him. Those last drawings - he would have known that wasn't going to result in a painting… it was instinctive.”

Eugene Von Guerard: Artist-traveller will be opened by State Library of Victoria CEO Kate Torney on Saturday March 24 at 4pm. It runs until May 27.