landscape painter, was born in Vienna at number 5 Goldne Birn adjacent to the Palais Auersperg, on 17 November 1811. His father, Bernhard, was one of Austria’s most successful miniature painters and through the patronage of Emperor Franz I had many royal sitters. By the time Eugene was 15, however, his father was having greater difficulty in attracting commissions, so the two set off together for Italy, travelling through Venice, Milan and Turin. They arrived at Rome in 1830, where Bernhard held an exhibition of his work and where they remained for two years while Eugen attended an art school run by Giovani Battista Bassi (1784-1852), a painter in the classical tradition of Rosa, Poussin and Claude. In Rome Eugene made contact with the group of expatriate German painters later known as the Nazarenes.
In 1832 Eugene and his father went to Naples where Bernhard succeeded in establishing himself at the court of Ferdinand II, King of the Two Sicilies. For the next four years father and son travelled throughout southern Italy and Sicily. In 1836 Bernhard died in a cholera epidemic, and 18 months later Eugene decided to go to Düsseldorf, his father’s birthplace, to study at the academy. Possibly his previous contact with Overbeck and his group in Rome also influenced this choice. Von Schadow, the director, had appointed Johann Wilhelm Schirmer master of the new landscape department (one of the first in Europe) and he and Karl Friedrich Lessing taught a 'naturgetreue Wiedergabe’ ('a response true to nature’). Consequently, long sketching trips into the Rhineland and Westphalia were encouraged.
Von Guérard remained in Düsseldorf until 1852. For a short time he was employed as drawing master to the son of an Englishman, Augustus Tulk, later the first librarian of the Melbourne Public Library, and it was possibly Tulk who persuaded him to emigrate to Victoria in August 1852. After spending 13 fruitless months on the goldfields near Ballarat, von Guérard resumed his painting career in Melbourne in April 1854. On 15 July he married Louise Arnz, daughter of a Düsseldorf publisher whom he had known in Europe. Their only child, Victoria Elizabeth, was born on 4 December 1857. In Australia the artist used the French version of his first name, signing his letters 'Eugène von Guérard’ and sometimes being addressed as 'monsieur de Guérard’.
Von Guérard participated in his first Melbourne art exhibition in 1854 showing eight paintings: portraits, landscapes and genre. He quickly gained popularity and by the following year had completed The Farm of Mr Perry on the Yarra (1855), the first of many commissions from prosperous landowners in Victoria, Tasmania, New South Wales and South Australia. Henceforth he relied on two basic landscape subjects, the homestead and the wilderness view. To both ends he travelled extensively through south-eastern Australia, going to the Western District in 1856-57 and to Cape Schanck and the Baw Baw Plateau with Nicholas Chevalier in 1858.
Von Guérard was awarded a gold medal at the 1858 Victorian Industrial Exhibition for A Native Camp in the Stony Rises, near Lake Timboon . The next year he visited Cape Otway and Gippsland as well as Sydney, Lake Illawarra and the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. He returned to Gippsland in 1860, went to Cape Otway and the Australian Alps in 1862, to Cape Schanck again in 1863, and revisited the Western District in 1864 and 1868.
Von Guérard’s first work to enter a public collection was Spring in the Valley of the Mitta Mitta , a painting commissioned by Archibald Michie, who presented it to the National Gallery of Victoria in 1866. At the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition his large book of views, Australian Landscapes , won a prize, although the artist later expressed reservations about the quality of the lithographs. In 1870 von Guérard was awarded the Cross of the Order of Franz Joseph by the Austrian Emperor. That year he sold Mount Kosciusko to the National Gallery of Victoria, his first such sale. In June he was chosen over Abram Louis Buvelot and other applicants as Master of the Painting School and Curator of the Victorian National Gallery. Although this ended all financial uncertainty, the gallery position also curtailed his sketching and painting. The last Victorian homestead commission was in 1869. During his decade as painting master he managed only two summer sketching tours – to Tasmania in 1875 and New Zealand in 1876. Although criticised for his antiquated teaching methods, he remained at the gallery until the end of 1881. Then he sailed via Suez to Italy and travelled north to settle in Düsseldorf. Throughout the 1880s he still painted, occasionally sending pictures to Australia. His daughter had married an Englishman and moved to London and he and his wife joined them in 1891. He died of influenza at Chelsea in 1901.
Von Guérard is considered to have painted over 200 oil paintings, of which about two-thirds are known. He was a charter member of the Victorian Society of Fine Arts (1857), the Royal Society (1860) and the Victorian Academy of Arts (1870) and had exhibited in Leipzig, Düsseldorf and Berlin before he came to Australia. After his arrival, he exhibited widely in Sydney and Melbourne as well as participating in international exhibitions in Paris, London, and Philadelphia. Australia’s most important romantic landscape painter during the third quarter of the nineteenth century, von Guérard clearly worked within the German romantic tradition (not the English as his contemporary James Smith, art critic for the Melbourne Argus , maintained). Yet his influence on his students was slight and he attracted no followers; his almost pantheistic vision of the Australian landscape remains unique.
His best paintings, like Mount William from Mount Dryden (1857) or Pulpit Rock, Cape Schanck (1865), illustrate the German romantic belief that divine power is present in nature. By physically and spiritually immersing himself in the natural world he was able to produce landscapes which were a means of expressing his personal religious feelings. Whether depicting Aborigines in an antipodean Eden or transplanted Europeans surrounded by their material success, von Guérard included in these carefully balanced and meticulously detailed compositions that cosmic awareness so familiar to the German romantic imagination.
- Writers:
- Comstock, Edward
Bruce, Candice
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
