“It took a new method of painting — outdoors, freely and with loaded, square-tipped brushes — and a few artists of rare talent to convey the real look and feel of Australia’s pastoral landscape, its coastline and its wealthy cities. The method, of course, was imported. It was borrowed from the European tradition of plein-air painting (not, despite the show’s title, from French Impressionism as we know it through the art of Monet, Renoir and Pissarro). And although the liberties it took with conventional standards of finish might have seemed deplorable to certain critics in Australia at the time, it was far from avant-garde in world-historical terms.”
Moving record of nation’s first glimpse at itself, Sebastian Smee, The Australian.
Andrew Frost
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