James Waltham Curtis

[1] Early 21st Century family trees published online by some of his direct descendants name his father as farm labourer James Curtis and his mother as Sarah Elizabeth Crouch.

"The artist’s father found himself obliged to take up with mercantile pursuits, which were as uncongenial to him, as they afterwards proved to be to his son, who inherited from his mother a marked fondness for the use of the pencil and the brush," wrote Smith.

Some of Curtis’ early art works, Smith recorded, attracted the attention of the wife of an eminent London barrister, who discerned in them "the promise of genius".

The family trees published by descendants seem unanimous in accepting that the marriage took place in December 1866 in St. Mary’s Anglican church in Bryanston Square, London.

Smith recorded that Curtis worked for the studio for eight or nine years and developed a friendship with co-owner Henry James Johnstone (1835-1907), an accomplished landscape artist as well as a portrait photographer.

Curtis admits he used to be envious watching the arrival and departure of coaches from the Melbourne post office, just around the corner from the photographic studio where he’d first worked.

"Many a time have I watched in Melbourne these phases of the locomotive public, and formed many glorious ideas of distant explorations when fate should have relieved me of business shackles," he wrote.

To appreciate the natural landscape around Melbourne, Curtis suggested, the observer must be prepared "to admire the gaunt, the grey and the dim – nature in fact in an iron-like frame of mind without the charms of the brightness and glory of colour, but exulting in a fierce and sturdy opposition to climatic conditions; having foliage that can repel the scorching rays of midsummer; roots than can extract nourishment from a soil burnt hard as stone; gnarled trunk and knotted boughs that defy lightning, drought and tempest".

Bold and erratic as may be the sweep of stem and branch, or irregular the masses of foliage, yet every accidental abrasion of bark by bird or insect, damage by fire or storm, is so unerringly renewed and compensated from Nature’s great storehouse that the result as a whole has an untamed harmony and rugged beauty that dwarfs the pine of Europe to a plaything, and reduces the oak, elm and chestnut to cabbage-headed commonplaces by comparison.

[13] It was a similarity of style noted at the time, with one Victorian magazine reviewer commenting that of all artists in the colony, Curtis was the one who came closest to Buvelot "in his delineation of Australian foliage".

[15] Paintings by Curtis were on public display at least from the second exhibition in Melbourne of the Victorian Academy of Arts in 1872, to which he contributed eight works, all watercolours, including ‘The Yarra, from Princes Bridge’; ‘Bush Track, near Nunawading’; ‘Swamp near Dromana’; and ‘Dry Creek at Sunbury’.

“He has many of the qualifications for success; and not least of these is a lively imagination, combined with a quick eye for the picture aspects of nature, and a nice sense of colour," observed one Argus writer in 1875.

[24] Far more important to Curtis’ survival as a professional artist, however, was the interest in his work shown by the eccentric American businessman, Thomas Welton Stanford (1832-1918), who had arrived in Australia in 1860 to become a successful merchant dealing in miners’ supplies and sewing machines.

Stanford, who had settled for life in Melbourne, had developed two strong passions following the death of his new wife, Minnie, and only child in 1870 – spiritualism, and Australian landscape art.

Stanford had works by many of the leading Australian landscape painters of the last half of the 1800s in his private collection at his East Melbourne home, which he opened for public viewing for two hours every Sunday for 13 years until 1904.

Without being exhibited in Australia, these were immediately donated by the owner to Stanford University in California, founded a few years earlier by his brother, Leland, and his wife, Jane.

The journalist James Smith recorded that later payments from Stanford, freeing Curtis from having to paint for a livelihood, enabled him to spend “five happy and fruitful years”, up to the time of his death in 1901.

In this final stage of his career, Smith wrote, “his interpretations of Australian landscape scenery gained steadily in power, fidelity, sweetness and poetry”.

“They are thoroughly characteristic of Australian scenery, from the foreground, which is always strongly and sharply brought out, through all the gradations of distance until the vapour on some-off hill melts into the sky.”[27] Victorian birth records show that Curtis and his wife Maria had at least six children between 1869 and 1878 – four daughters and two sons, all born in Melbourne.

Before being made part of the museum collection, these works were shown in their entirety in 1921, and possibly a few subsequent years, in a new art gallery building at the university built with funds from T. W. Stanford’s estate.

[32] By 1986, however, a Curtis work called ‘Horseman Fording a Stream’ was the only one of almost 150 Australian landscapes formerly held by Stanford University’s museum (including by other leading artists) still in its possession.