Add Category
Posted
The Gippsland Art Gallery is hoping the new owner of a famous painting of Rosedale in the 1800s will allow the work to return to the region.
Austrian artist Eugene von Guérard's painting of John King's Snake's Ridge property will be sold at auction in Sydney tonight.
Art valuers suggest the painting could sell for more than $1 million.
Von Guérard also painted Scottish pioneer Angus McMillan's Bushy Park home which hangs in the National Gallery of Australia.
The curator of the Gippsland Art Gallery in Sale, Simon Gregg, said the works captured a pivotal time in the region's history.
Art historians believe that von Guérard was aware of the Aboriginal massacres that had taken place in the region, 20 years before the Snake's Ridge portrait was painted.
It makes the work particularly unique as it is charged with racial and political connotations.
"In the foreground, very prominent, we have a group of Gunai Kurnai people," Mr Gregg said.
"It's interesting that this painting is very much about their possession of the land, but also in a sense their dispossession of the land — about how they're being forced off the land by the Europeans coming in at this time."
Von Guérard was an Austrian-born painter who came out to Australia during the Australian goldrush in the 1850s.
In 1860, he was invited by John King, owner of the Snake's Ridge property in Gippsland — the area now known as Rosedale — to paint a portrait of his homestead.
Following his visit to the Snake's Ridge property, von Guérard visited Angus MacMillan to paint his Bushy Park property.
The von Guérard portrait of the Bushy Park property is considered one of the nation's most significant 19th Century works and is now housed in the National Gallery of Australia.
Painted in 1861, the portrait entitled Mr John King's Station is categorised in the same league as the Bushy Park work but was housed privately overseas for several decades in the collection of James Fairfax.
The historically significant painting features a skyline of the Gippsland Alps with Mount Buller and Ben Cruachan in the distance.
The middle ground features a panorama of the property with a pair of European settlers, one presumed to be Mr King himself, fixing a wooden fence.
The untamed Australian landscape of fallen gum trees and stringy bark are cultivated into a pleasant, civilised utopian scene, depicted as an extension of the English countryside — a marketing technique common to commissions of the era and designed to entice prospective European settlers to Australia.
With the passing of James Fairfax earlier this year, the painting was recently returned to Australia for auction.
"I don't think we're quite in a position to bid on it," Mr Gregg said.
"It's estimated for about $1.2 million, but I think we're looking at more like $1.4 to $1.5 million.
"We can only hope that it is going to go to a good public collector who is willing to lend it to us one day, or perhaps a good private collection.
"But for that sort of money it is certain to go to a good home."
Topics: art-history, painting, visual-art, rosedale-3847, sale-3850