Exhibition of Australian Art in London
Held at London's Grafton Galleries between April and September 1898, it featured 371 artworks made in Australia by 114 artists, and was the first major exhibition of Australian art to occur internationally.
The exhibition focused almost exclusively on art from the previous ten years, a time of intense patriotic feeling in Britain's Australian colonies, which were then on the cusp of federating to form the Commonwealth of Australia.
By staging the exhibition in London, the capital of the British Empire, the organisers sought to promote the idea of an emerging Australian tradition in Western art, and to depict the maturity of Australia as an embryonic nation.
Despite these controversies, the exhibition won considerable, if unanticipated, critical acclaim in Britain, and such was the show's popularity that Grafton Galleries kept it open for four months past the original closing date.
It remains the largest exhibition of Australian art in Britain, and is also notable for its near equal representation of women artists, a far higher percentage than any other show of its kind.
[1] Although she expressly wished to leave the exhibition's curation "in the hands of those immediately involved with the movement", Walker loaned four works to the show, among them Purple, Green and Gold by Streeton and his own View of Sydney Harbour.
[6] Despite "clear displays of favouritism", the final selection of works received praise for it uniting many professional and amateur artists of different styles.
[6] Although artists born and living in Australia contributed the majority of works, the show was not limited to this group, as had been reported by some uninformed British journalists.
Reviewing the collection as whole, Thomas Humphry Ward observed that, "the broad, summary treatment, the firm and yet careful drawing, and the manner of laying on paint are in origin French.
"[19] While The Westminster Gazette took "the greatest pleasure" in the "agreeable air of 'un-Britishness'" that pervaded the collection,[14] the critics for The Globe and The Architect lamented the clear influence of progressive French art on the Australians.
Our hot sun, our coppery skies, our glowing sunsets, equally with our commonplace mining and grazing and farming, all call for dinstinctive handling, which they will never get through the methods of the British school.
[25] Charles Sedelmeyer, a leading art dealer based in Paris, purchased five works by four artists, notably Tudor St. George Tucker's Sunset.
[27] In an article for Australia's Daily Telegraph, Piguenit highlighted the discrepancy between critical opinion and public taste in England: "The English people are not guided very largely by what they see in the papers about pictures.
[28] According to Petrit Abazi, the sales "indicate that art characterised by conventional, exotic and academic principles, and not the plein air or School of Paris adopted by the Australian van guard, was best received on the English market.
