Ballarat art lovers were able to see their city depicted like never before on Saturday when the Art Gallery of Ballarat officially unveiled its latest collection from renowned Austrian-born painter Eugene von Guérard.
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On top of a host of iconic images depicting both Australian and European landscapes, the exhibition boasts a series of previously lost sketches created while the artist was living in Ballarat.
The works have come from a host of private collectors from around the country as well as some of Australia’s most recognised institutions such as the state libraries of Victoria and New South Wales.
State Library of Victoria chief executive Kate Torney, who was raised in Ballarat, said the gallery was the ideal place to display the rare sketches depicting the region.
“His connection with Ballarat ran very deep, he was seeing this landscape for the first time and if you look at his works you see that sense,” Ms Torney said.
“In (von Guérard’s) work it’s often the story behind the story that brings out a piece of work and unlike a gallery the library collects works which tell the story of the state, and that’s exactly what his works did.”
Titled Eugene von Guérard: Artist – Traveller, the exhibition gives an insight into the artist’s experiences on the Goldfields in an era where he like so many others came to western Victoria looking to find his fortune. The sketches, which range in subject from humans to natural flora and fauna, tell the tale of daily life in Ballarat in the 1850s and 1860s.
The exhibition has been curated by Dr Ruth Pullin, who is about to release a book titled The Artist as Traveller.
Dr Pullin said it was her exposure to the rare sketchbooks during her time at the State Library of New South Wales which fostered her passion for von Guérard’s work.
“It’s through these sketchbooks that you really get a sense of the man throughout his entire career, and they’re not just working documents, they’re very personal, they’re like travel diaries and you see the most intimate...response to a subject,” Dr Pullin said.
“People had looked at the sketchbooks before but more or less from the perspective of having looked at paintings and trying to find the relevant drawing in the sketchbooks, whereas I wanted to look at the sketchbooks as the beginning.”