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The reassessment of colonial art has focused on retrieving the wealth and diversity of colonial visual culture and the careers of individual artists before the 1880s, often dismissed in previous histories such as Robert Hughes’ The Art of Australia. One of the earliest and most significant reassessments, Bernard Smith’s edited anthology, Documents on Art and Taste in Australia: The Colonial Period, 1770–1914 (1975), provides a seminal reference point for such revisionism. It codifies a number of key themes including the formation of aesthetic views about nature, the development of art collections and education, and the rise of nationalism (Smith 1975, ix). Focusing more specifically on the evolution of landscape painting in Australia, Tim Bonyhady’s Images in Opposition: Australian Landscape Painting, 1801–1890 (1985) represents another foundational reevaluation of colonial art. Organized around the framework of a dialectic, Bonyhady examines the construction of the colonial landscape through contrasting aspects of Australian scenery – an antipodean arcadia untouched by European settlement, a pastoral arcadia inhabited by squatters, and a sublime wilderness not yet conquered – which, “far from simply chronicling the progress of European settlement,” only had an “approximate relation to changes in land use in the colonies” (Bonyhady 1985, xii). Later, in The Colonial Earth (2000), Bonyhady challenges the standard view that the destruction of the Australian landscape was an inevitable part of the process of settlement, demonstrating that, while many colonists were alienated by their new environment, there were others who delighted in it, from the ubiquitous gum tree to the continent’s giant tree ferns and its picturesque and sublime scenery of fern gullies, waterfalls, and mountains, and campaigned for its conservation predating later environmentalist movements (Bonyhady 2000, 2–3).⁸

Other nuanced readings of colonial art employed broader cultural frameworks such as Robert Dixon’s The Course of Empire: Neo-Classical Culture in New South Wales 1788–1860, which demonstrates how early colonial artists like Joseph Lycett grafted neoclassical ideals of the progress of civilization onto their landscapes through literary principles of associationism appealing to the emotions of taste (Dixon 1985, 56–58). In The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (1987), cultural historian Paul Carter locates the Australian landscape as an active object of desire subject to the colonists’ exploratory urge. Indebted to Smith’s European Vision, the open-endedness of Carter’s spatial history revolves around the mobile act of journeying in and through the landscape in which explorers and settlers constantly found what they were looking for, counterbalancing mythic notions of an essential Australianness emanating from the land (Smith 2002a, 48). This argument is extended in his Living in a New Country (1992) in which Carter argues that later colonial artists such as von Guérard did not simply reproduce views but “consciously attempt[ed] to construct spaces that could be visualized” (Carter 1992, 61).

A post-colonialist emphasis on spaces of encounter and exchange further contributed to revisionist readings of Indigenous agency in colonial art. In her analysis of Joseph Lycett’s watercolors of the Awakabal people, Jeanette Hoorn has argued that the artist “presents an image of a people in possession and full enjoyment of their land”, providing visual evidence against the doctrine of terra nullius, which had recently been overturned as a justification for colonization by the Mabo decision of the High Court of Australia in 1992 (Hoorn 2005a, 128). Concentrating on the colonial corroboree genre, exemplified in Lycett’s Corroboree at Newcastle, Anita Callaway and Candace Bruce have demonstrated that such paintings are highly charged representations of the cross-cultural encounter (Callaway and Bruce 1991). Reevaluating the landscape paintings of Augustus Earle, a traveling artist of empire who resided in Australia in the 1820s, Leonard Bell has suggested that his Waterfall in Australia (1826–1827) challenges the conventions of typical colonial imagery of sublime scenery. Rather than representing Earle’s visual mastery, possession, and control over the Australian landscape, Bell contends he depicts himself as an intermediary figure on the threshold of a very different experience of knowledge and place. More recently, David Hansen has cautioned against the academic deconstruction that tends to inform art historical revisionism of race relations within the colonial encounter describing it as “a killing field of theory, a terra nullius where imported European aesthetic stock – the Picturesque, the Sublime, the Grotesque, the Melancholy – may safely graze” (Hansen 2010, 47–48).

Beyond a reevaluation of the colonial encounter, an array of scholarship has explored the broad range of visual culture tendencies of the colonial era, resulting in foundational reference works in the field of colonial photography such as The Mechanical Eye in Australia: Photography 1841–1900 (1985) by the photographic historians Alan Davies and Peter Stanbury and Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839–1988 (1988) by Gael Newton, as well as in the field of colonial design, most notably, Terrence Lane and Jessie Serle’s Australians at Home. A Documentary History of Australian Domestic Interiors from 1788 to 1914 (1990). One of the most instrumental works to emerge in this context was the Dictionary of Australian Artists: Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engravers to 1870 (1992) edited by art and architectural historian Joan Kerr.⁹The first book to embrace amateur colonial art, it was significant in diffusing the canon and promoting women and aboriginal artists. Similar to William Moore’s The Story of Australian Art (1934) in its pluralistic content culled from a wide variety of sources, Kerr’s Dictionary challenged the linear and ordered narratives of dominant art historical writing, providing an effective alternative model for evaluating Australian visual culture (Peers 2011, 2–3). Anita Callaway’s Visual Ephemera: Theatrical Art in Nineteenth-Century Australia (2000) is one of the most important works to emerge from Kerr’s non-canonical approach. Focusing on ephemeral forms such as transparencies, tableaux, panoramas and theatrical scenery traditionally overlooked in mainstream histories, Callaway examines how such works were “particularly significant” in Australia “as the chief disseminators of High Art imagery, albeit in a Low Art guise” in a carnivalesque system that was a peculiarly Australian cultural process (Callaway 2000 iv, x).

Kerr’s Dictionary also contributed to the feminist narrative of retrieval in works such as Strange Women: Essays in Art and Gender (1994), edited by Jeannette Hoorn, which contains a number of essays that explore the estrangement of women from the landscape and their exclusion from the formation of an Australian identity at the end of the nineteenth century. Hoorn’s compendium was followed by Heritage: The National Women’s Art Book, 500 Works by 500 Women Artists from Colonial Times to 1955 (1995) and Past Present: The National Women’s Art Anthology (1999), both edited by Joan Kerr with the latter also by Jo Holder. Kerr’s continued promotion of amateur art also informs Caroline Jordan’s Picturesque Pursuits: Colonial Women Artists and the Amateur Tradition (2005), which explores the feminine practices of portrait, flower, and landscape painting as critical in forging social networks on a familial, community, and national level while fostering an aesthetic connection to the Australian environment.

The significance of networks of immigrant and traveling artists, amateurs, and designers both within the Pacific Rim and the British Empire in the development of colonial Australian visual culture has figured prominently in more recent research, notably Exiles & Emigrants: Epic Journeys to Australia in the Victorian Era (NGV, 2005), an exhibition curated by Patricia MacDonald and Art and the British Empire (2007), edited by Tim Barringer, Geoff Quilley, and Douglas Fordham. In Images of the Pacific Rim: Australia and California, 1850–1935 (2010), Erika Esau explores the cultural economy of photography, commercial design, and cinema in these two regions, which was governed by “aesthetic exchange dependent on itinerancy, reproducibility and portability” (Esau 2010, 17–18). Itinerancy is also a major theme in Geoffrey Batchen’s reevaluation of colonial Australian photography in an essay for the survey exhibition The Photograph and Australia (Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) 2014), which focuses on the relationship between the photograph as a material object and the circulation of its photographic image, or immaterial double. Batchen argues for a revised history of Australian photography “built around the logic of immigration and dissemination” (Batchen 2015, 264).

In the past two decades a number of monographic exhibitions have also contributed substantially to the expanding discourse of colonial art history. John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque (2004) curated by David Hansen, then Senior Curator at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, combined the artist’s Aboriginal and pastoral landscapes of Tasmanian scenery with paintings produced in Britain prior to his emigration to demonstrate his constructed vision of Australia as an antipodean arcadia that merged Claudean convention with the empiricism of natural history to cater to contemporary taste. The theme of the immigrant artist looking simultaneously back to Europe and forward to Australia also informed the 2011 NGV exhibition, Eugene von Guérard: Nature Revealed. Focusing on von Guérard’s ambition to present the wondrous environment of Australia to the public, while maintaining an absolute fidelity to nature, this retrospective explored the influence of contemporary theories of natural science, particularly Alexander von Humboldt’s directive to artists to depict plants contextually in their local ecosystems, on von Guérard’s Australian landscapes.¹⁰

Lewin: Wild Art (State Library of New South Wales [SLNSW], 2012) and its accompanying catalogue Mr. J.W. Lewin, Painter and Naturalist by Mitchell Librarian Richard Neville similarly explores the impact of the natural sciences on the career of Australia’s first professional artist, John William Lewin. Neville reveals how Lewin, schooled in generic natural history illustration “unexpectedly discovered his own visual language” not only through precise observations of Australian vegetation but through his emotional and physical investment in his new home (Neville 2012, 9). Most recently in Australian Sketchbook: Colonial Life and the Art of S.T. Gill (State Library of Victoria [SLVIC], 2015) curator Sasha Grishin, presents S.T. Gill, famed for his 1850s lithographs of the Victorian goldfields and his frank portrayals of prospectors, larrikins, and swagmen, as “Australia’s first painter of modern life” through his interrogation of Australian society and its values. Gill, according to Grishin, was also the first to invent the Australian character of the digger: “tough, resilient, resourceful, possessing a dry humour, one who was true to his mates, but intolerant of all forms of authority, humbug and institutionalized religion” (Grishin conversation 2015). This quintessential type, he contends, was subsequently built upon by the artists of The Bulletin and appropriated by the myth-making nationalist campaign to commemorate Australia’s soldiers in the Great War.

The rediscovery of the wealth and diversity of colonial visual culture challenged the orthodox view that a distinctive Australian art only began with the Heidelberg School in the 1880s, a myth that arose against the backdrop of nationalism and federalism in the late nineteenth century and was perpetuated by twentieth-century art world politics (Sayers 2001, 80). One of the major catalysts for the reassessment of the Heidelberg School was the exhibition, Golden Summers: Heidelberg and Beyond (NGV, 1985), which included key works such as Arthur Streeton’s Golden Summer, Eaglemont (1889), which had not been seen in public since 1924. It dispelled the illusion that the artists of the Heidelberg School only painted “pastoral Australia under a midday sun with a bright ‘Impressionist’ palette”, presenting instead a diversity of responses to Impressionism by Australian artists including urban imagery and portraiture (Galbally 1985, 9). In the accompanying catalogue, Jane Clark and Bridget Whitelaw demonstrate that the impact of French Impressionism on the Heidelberg School was quite minimal and that plein-air French artists of the 1860s and 70s, including Jean Francois Millet and Jules Bastien-Lepage, and their subsequent English interpreters, were more significant inspirations (Galbally 1985, 9–10).

Golden Summers’ emphasis on the group’s “urban-based sensitivity to and nostalgia for Australia’s pioneering history” was concomitantly explored by Leigh Astbury in City Bushmen: The Heidelberg School and the Rural Mythology (1985) (Galbally 1985, 10). Astbury demonstrates that the artists of the Heidelberg School were ultimately “city bushmen” whose embrace of the bush as a form of nationalist sentiment was matched by their bohemian lifestyles that revolved around city studios, art teaching, and portrait commissions. His views built upon Ian Burn’s “‘Beating about the Bush’: The Landscapes of the Heidelberg School” (1980), which points out that the bush, a place of hard work for real selectors, farm laborers and pastoralists, was instead experienced as a pleasurable respite from the city by artists who belonged to an “educated urban capitalist class”. (Burn 1980, 20–21, 35). In reality, this idyllic arcadia was well-trafficked suburban bushland easily accessible by the extension of Melbourne’s railway system in the 1880s, as demonstrated by Helen Topliss in The Artists’ Camps: Plein Air Painting in Melbourne 1885–1898 (1984).

These revelations renewed the interrogation of the relationship between what was perceived as the distinctive “Australian” style of the Heidelberg School and the international Impressionist movement. In the essay, “The Sunny South: Australian Impressionism” (1990), Virginia Spate suggests that the radical departure from tonal plein-airism in works such as Roberts’ Allegro con brio: Bourke Street west (c. 1885–1886, reworked 1890) and Streeton’s Golden Summer, Eaglemont (1889) constituted a distinct modification from French Impressionism (Spate 1990, 120). Spate contends that Australian Impressionism was marked by a fundamental duality, in which artists sought to be true to their perception of effects of light while at the same time investing this light, especially its sunny, golden nature, with symbolic resonance associated with the optimistic vision of Australia as a new land of health and abundance (Spate 1990, 117).¹¹ In Charles Conder: The Last Bohemian (2003) and the subsequent AGNSW retrospective of this artist, the least nationalist member of the Heidelberg School, Ann Galbally provides an extended focus on his fin-de-siecle silk paintings and British and European oeuvre. In contrast to previous readings of such work as decorative and marginal, Galbally portrays Conder as a cosmopolitan aesthete more in tune with his international contemporaries than Roberts, McCubbin, or Streeton (Peers 2005, 193).

Other reevaluations of the Heidelberg School focused on the contribution of women artists who made excursions to the artists’ camps in Box Hill and Eaglemont, including Jane Sutherland and Clara Southern. In the 1992 exhibition, Completing the Picture: Women Artists and the Heidelberg Era, Victoria Hammond and Juliette Peers acknowledged the critical role of women in shaping the history of the period which witnessed the rise and decline of the first wave of the women’s movement, and presented women’s interpretation of the landscape.¹² Women, “identified with the home, family, morality and conventionality,” played a marginal role in the myths created by the urban male artists and radical nationalists of the 1890s, representing, as Peers observes in the catalogue, “the constraining values from which the bohemian fancied himself liberated” (Peers 1992, 28).

A rebranding of the Heidelberg School was attempted in the Australian Impressionism exhibition (NGV, 2007), which focused on the work of Jane Sutherland in addition to the four major artists associated with the school, Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton, and Charles Conder in an effort to destabilize this artistic pantheon.¹³ The exhibition also attempted to replace the term “Heidelberg School”, coined by critic Sidney Dickinson in 1891 and used in the twentieth-century writings of William Moore and Bernard Smith as a general identifier of the nationalist phase of landscape art in Melbourne and Sydney in the late nineteenth century, with “Australian Impressionism.” In his catalogue essay, Gerard Vaughan claims that the term “Impressionism” “came to be readily associated with the new international style of plein-airism which developed in the 1870s and 1880s around artists like Jules Bastien-Lepage” (Vaughan 2007, 16). David Hansen qualifies this association in his essay, “National Naturalism”, in which he argues that in the bush settings of their national pictures, Roberts, McCubbin, and Streeton were following the rising artistic mode of naturalism, which combined academic drawing and modeling with a plein air atmosphere and the contemporary subject matter of Impressionism and Aestheticism, in Europe and Britain.

More recently, Ann Galbally has argued that the drive to rename members of the Heidelberg School “Australian Impressionists” is unsustainable due to the emphasis they placed on developing new landscape paradigms and a genre of national imagery culled from popular black-and-white illustrations over their technical experimentation with color (Galbally 2011, 73). Following Hansen, she suggests that the Heidelberg School artists engaged in a high-keyed naturalism that contributed to a vision of “aesthetic nationalism” that combined landscape with an interest in heroicizing the life of the bush settler spurred by nostalgia (Galbally 2011, 75, 79). The duality of this aesthetic nationalism is demonstrated through Roberts’ Shearing the Rams (1890), a “powerful fusion of mythic subject matter with a Realist aesthetic” which celebrates masculine labor and the pastoral promise of Australia, while also recalling the past through the shearers’ use of outdated shearing technology (Galbally 2011, 80).