John Glover
1767 - 1849 A view between the Swan River and King George's Sound 1832-34- oil on canvas
John Glover is one of Australia's most celebrated colonial landscape painters. In England, he was a highly successful watercolourist and painter of landscapes in the tradition of French artist Claude Lorrain.
Arriving in Australia in 1831, Glover adapted his picturesque style and luminous technique to his new surrounds, creating naturalistic and atmospheric paintings of Australian nature, settler life and Aboriginal culture.
While Glover's Australian paintings are remarkably naturalistic, they also employed romantic symbolism and dramatic lighting effects, revealing his subjective response to the landscape and Indigenous people. His paintings are informed by European notions of an Antipodean Arcadia, with Indigenous people living in a landscape unsullied by European contact, despite the actual situation of dispossession and violence at the hands of the colonists.
Nonetheless, Glover is significant for being the first painter of the Australian landscape sensitive to its visual and spatial qualities and its latent expressive potential.
Source: Art Gallery of NSW, biography of John Glover