Book review

Eugene Von Guerard: A German Romantic in the Antipodes by Candice Bruce, Edward Comstock & Frank McDonald
Published by Alister Taylor Publishers, 1982.

Reviewed by MICHAEL DUNN

Von Guerard is less known in New Zealand than in Australia where he spent the greater part of his painting career. Apart from a short trip to this country made late in his life in 1876, Von Guerard had no connections with New Zealand directly and few contacts with artists who were based here. However, two major paintings of Milford Sound and of Lake Wakatipu, based on sketches he made during his short New Zealand visit are widely regarded by critics as ranking among his finest works. He exhibited them both in Australia and Europe, and their sale at high prices helped him to make the money needed for his return to Europe soon afterwards.

By the time of his departure from Australia in 1882, Von Guerard had come to be regarded as an old-fashioned painter. Since 1870 he had held a position as Instructor of Painting at the School of Art in Melbourne where his 'emphasis on accurate topographical observation and his introspective and reverent approach to nature aroused antipathy among his more progressive pupils...', according to the authors of this new monograph on the artist.

The lavishly-produced publication does more than justice to the less-than-special talents of Von Guerard - an artist who was often criticised in his lifetime for the dry and ponderous nature of his landscape paintings. In colonial Australia where he went in 1852 to make his fortune in the Victorian gold-fields, he was unable to make a good living from his art. From the eighteen-sixties his grand views of Australian wilderness landscape, executed laboriously in the studio, had to compete with the plein-air pictures of Louis Buvelot. Unable to change his style or approach, Von Guerard became something of an anachronism. It was the work of Buvelot with its relative freshness not that of Von Guerard, which was to inspire the young Australian painters who formed the Heidelberg School of Australian impressionism.

Born in Vienna in 1811, the son of a painter of miniatures, Von Guerard passed a stimulating youth spent travelling around artistic centres in Italy. He met members of the German Nazerener group in Rome who may have influenced his style of painting. His main formal training took place at the Dusseldorf Academy in the eighteen-forties. He was taught landscape painting by J.W Schirmer, who instructed him in an approach that involved careful preliminary studies and a restraint in the handling of paint. As the authors point out, his ideas on landscape painting have connections with German Romantic art of the first decades of the nineteenth century. His fondness for remote wilderness areas and for the sublime effects of high mountain ranges, imbued with a degree of spiritual awe, align him with the tradition associated with Caspar David Freidrich.

Von Guerard was able to find equivalent subjects in the Australian landscape to those he was familiar with in European art. He appears to have been less able to see the potential for entirely new effects of colour, space and atmosphere that continental Australia offered to a painter.

It has to be remembered that Von Guerard did not originally intend to make a career as a painter in Australia. It was gold that drew him there in 1852. Lack of success on the gold-fields by 1854 forced him to return to painting to make his living. Competent though his Australian views are, they lack a real feeling for the distinctive colour and light of the country. Von Guerard, whether painting Italy or Australia, achieves a rather cold mechanical rendering of light. Couple this with his rather pedestrian draughtsmanship (especially noticeable in the handling of figures and buildings) and the results are not always successful or appealing. Only rarely did Von Guerard attempt special subjects typical of his new environment. One small painting of a bush-fire suggests that he might have been capable of more exciting work if he had allowed himself more spontaneity and experimentation. This, one suspects, was not typical of his character.

His New Zealand paintings, especially Milford Sound with Pembroke Peak and Bowen Falls (1877), show Von Guerard at his best. As a critic for the New Zealand Mail wrote in 1879 of his work: 'I am not at all partial to the productions of this artist; in fact to use a term that is out of art circles and belongs, by rights, to the softer sex, he always appears too "finikin" and labored, but if ever he possessed a spark of genius.. . that genius blazes forth in this picture . . .'

Of the book itself it is hard to speak too highly. The colour reproductions of Von Guerard's paintings are large and of very high quality. The design of the book is careful and practical given its size. Furthermore, the research of the text and catalogue has been fastidious. It provides a useful addition to the available literature on landscape painting in Australia in the mid-nineteenth century.