J a N E D E E

JANE DEETH THROUGH THE LENS OF THE GLOVER PRIZE > According to the Oxford English Dictionary the modern form of the word landscape, with its connotations of scenery, appeared in the late 16th century when the term landschape was introduced by Dutch painters to refer to paintings of inland natural or rural places. COPYRIGHT © Jane Deeth 2011 What artists have chosen to depict in landscape painting has shifted over time. Today, this genre of art-making is not only about representing the natural world as we see it, but PUBLISHER The John Glover Society, Evandale, Tasmania increasingly it is also about how we construct and understand the world we live in. PHOTOGRAPHY Courtesy of the artists, the relevant collections, James Abbott, John Leeman (5), Philip Biggs (41,42), In this book we look through the eyes of John Glover and many of the artists who have entered Philip Kuruvita (43), and Philip Biggs and The Examiner Newspaper (48). the Glover Prize in order to examine the different ways landscape can be expressed and ISBN 978-0-646-55840-0 understood. DESIGN CCD Studio You are invited to take the journey into worlds that may excite and delight as well as confront and confound. We hope this small publication will contribute to the conversation about what THE AUTHOR: landscape might be and what it might have to offer us. Dr Jane Deeth is the curator of the Glover Prize. She also runs New Audiences for Art, a consultancy working with individuals and arts organisations on projects and public programs aimed at introducing new audiences to the more challenging aspects of contemporary art. WHAT IS THE GLOVER PRIZE? > The Glover Prize is an annual award for a curators Peter Timms, David Hansen, Maudie landscape painting of Tasmania. The project Palmer, Anthony Bond OAM, Francis Parker was initiated in 2004 by the John Glover Society, and Kelly Gellatly; critic John MacDonald; a group of enthusiastic people from Evandale, and renowned artists Rick Amor, Janet a small village south of Launceston on the Lawrence, John Wolseley and Imants Tillers. northern plains of Tasmania. The prize is The Glover Prize is acquisitive which means named after painter John Glover (1767–1849) that each year a new work is added to a who was an early colonial resident of the plains. collection, creating a reference point for Today, Glover is often referred to as ‘the diverse perspectives on land, landscape, art father of Australian landscape painting’ for his and ideas across time. capacity to face the challenge of capturing the The combination of strong historical qualities of the new environment and light that connections, a diversity of artists interested he encountered in this far-flung colony. The in engaging with landscape painting, high Glover aims to emulate the innovative approach calibre adjudicators, committed sponsors Glover had to his own art practice as he and a supportive community contribute to grappled with this unfamiliar environment. making The Glover the most prestigious Each year, a panel of three distinguished annual prize for landscape painting in artists, curators, art educators and other arts Australia, while also providing enthusiastic industry professionals have the task of choosing audiences with regular access to what is a winner from hundreds of entries from across happening in the world of contemporary the globe. Judges have included writers and landscape painting. 0.03 WHO WAS JOHN GLOVER? > John Glover was born on 18 Glover developed a new way of using and somewhat non-flattering attitudes February 1767 at Houghton on the Hill, this water-based medium not just as a towards Glover’s oil painting became near Leicester, England. He was the tinted wash but as vibrant and detailed apparent, as the drama and turbulence youngest son of a farmer and grew colour that could compare with oil of romantic sublime themes took over up not only working in the fields but painting. from the more serene picturesque also drawing the world he saw and landscapes that Glover preferred. Add a Glover painted in oils too, of course. developing a love for nature. At around financial depression and the emigration This was the preferred medium of 20 years of age he was appointed of his sons a couple years before, and London’s Royal Academy. Selection writing master at the Free School in we see Glover leave England for Van for the Academy’s annual exhibition Appleby where he started painting in oil Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), arriving was a mark of success that Glover and watercolour. He married a woman in 1831 on his 64th birthday. He was regularly achieved, along with his nine years his senior and visited London to live a further eighteen years on this contemporaries JMW Turner and John for drawing and painting lessons. In island in the Southern Ocean. Constable. However, unlike these two 1794 he set up a business as a drawing artists, Glover was denied entry into the In Van Diemen’s Land, Glover’s master in Lichfield, and from here Academy’s illustrious ranks. Instead, commitment to observation enabled undertook many sketching tours of Glover’s highest official position was him to grapple with the new and the picturesque English countryside. with the very successful Society for challenging conditions he encountered John Glover, Cattle by a River c.1815, watercolour over traces of pencil, 26cm x 39.3cm, John Millwood Collection Although today we know Glover by his Watercolour Painting of which he was a in this upside down place. oil paintings, he made his name with founding member. watercolour. In the late 1700s and early Glover died in 1841 at Patterdale, his 1800s, watercolour was considered the By the mid-1820s the market for property on the Nile River, and is buried medium of avant-garde artists. watercolours was just about saturated, nearby at Deddington Chapel. 0.05 THE STYLES OF JOHN GLOVER GLOVER HAD A NUMBER OF QUITE DISTINCT WAYS OF PAINTING DURING HIS YEARS IN VAN DIEMEN’S LAND. [FROM MEMORY] The Swilker Oak in Needwood Forest, Staffordshire was many centuries old > Glover used his large collection of and survived the massive demand for sketchbooks to remember and remake wood during the industrial revolution the places he had visited on his long walks which decimated the forests of England. though the English countryside and on the Glover sketched the tree in the late Grand Tour of Europe. The paintings fitted 1700s, well before he left England and readily into the style appreciated by his painted it nine years after he arrived in patrons back in England. Van Diemen’s Land. John Glover, Swilker Oak, c. 1840, oil on canvas, 76cm x 114.5cm, National Trust Tasmania Clarendon Collection 0.07 John Glover, Mills Plains, Ben Lomond, Ben Loder and Ben Nevis in the Distance, c.1836, oil on canvas, 76.2cm x 152.5cm, Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery Collection [FROM IMAGINATION] Patterdale (Australian landscape with cattle: the artist’s property) John Glover, , c.1833, > When Glover sought to imagine the land before the Europeans came, he created poetic images oil on canvas 76.7cm x 114.6cm, National Library of Australia Rex Nan Kivell Collection with exaggerated serpentine trees. These idealised and peaceful imaginings of the world of the First Peoples of Tasmania became a significant theme in his work. [FROM REALITY] In his first year in Van Diemen’s Land, Glover met and drew the Aborigines he encountered in Hobart > When Glover painted his own land grant at Mills Plains, as in this picture, Town. He was aware of the desperate predicament the Tasmanian Aboriginal people were in, with he faithfully recorded the minute details of the land, including the messy most of those surviving the undeclared Black War being gathered together on George Augustus antipodean scrub. These paintings have a freshness and intense realism Robinson’s so-called ‘friendly mission’. No longer living on their land as they had done for millennia, that pre-empt Australian Impressionists like Tom Roberts, Frederick these men, women and children swam and danced for Glover as they waited to be relocated to the McCubbin and Arthur Streeton by several decades. islands in Bass Strait. Glover reused these drawings over and over again in many of his works. 0.09 Launceston (Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery) GLOVER’S >'GLOVER COUNTRY' WAS Launceston TERMED BY AUSTRALIAN Airport Blessington LEGACY IMPRESSIONIST PAINTER Ben Lomond Mills Plains > Glover made paintings depicting places Perth Evandale Nile River TOM ROBERTS (1856 – 1931). Patterdale retraced from his memory; representing the land before him; and conjuring imaginings of ROBERTS WAS A REGULAR Longford Clarendon Deddington previous times. These different approaches VISITOR TO THE EVANDALE Nile use the landscape to describe alternative REGION AS IT WAS THE HOME views of the world. OF BOTH OF HIS WIVES. IN In the years following Glover’s death, other 1928, WHILE HERE TO MOURN South Esk River approaches to art making evolved as artists THE DEATH OF HIS FIRST WIFE, sought to communicate ideas about life, the ROBERTS RESTORED GLOVER’S universe and everything through the process of applying paint to flat surfaces. Today, GRAVESITE AT DEDDINGTON Hobart artists have a very full palette of possibilities (Tasmanian Museum CHAPEL.INCIDENTALLY, TOM and Art Gallery) to call upon. ROBERTS IS BURIED AT The Glover Prize does not ask artists to CHRIST CHURCH ILLAWARRA copy Glover’s style. The challenge is to NEAR LONGFORD harness Glover’s capacity to communicate through the medium of landscape painting, and to consider the value of the Tasmanian John Glover, Self Portrait, c.1792–3 landscape as a vehicle for talking about the Collection Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery world around us and the things that matter.

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