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landscape painter, was born on 18 February 1767 at Houghton-on-the-Hill near Leicester, England, son of a small farm owner, William Glover, and his wife Ann. He showed an early ability and fascination for sketching. In 1786 he was appointed writing master at the Free School in Appleby, Westmoreland (now Cumbria), during which time he often travelled to London to see exhibitions and take painting lessons from William Payne and John Smith.

In 1794 Glover moved to Lichfield, Staffordshire, where he made a living as a painting and drawing master. He continued to visit London, however, to attend the cabinet of Dr Thomas Monro, the celebrated physician and connoisseur who fostered the talent of many young artists, among them Thomas Girtin, Joshua Cristall, John Varley and J.M.W. Turner. Glover tried his hand at watercolour portrait painting with no real success, known examples being rather clumsy. At this time he also produced a group of etchings, the earliest dated example being Docks of 1797, the latest a river landscape dated 1809. A design for the frontispiece to Anna Seward’s Original Sonnets on Various Subjects and Odes Paraphrased from Horace was engraved by W. Angus and published in 1799. No similar work is known, although after settling in Van Diemen’s Land Glover stated that failing eyesight alone prevented him from producing the engraving for a frontispiece which George Augustus Robinson had requested for his proposed account of his work as protector of the Aborigines.

During the time spent in Lichfield, Glover developed his life-long habit of travelling to both well-known and obscure beauty spots in search of subject matter for his paintings. He was a great walker, despite the handicap of a massive body (he was over 6 feet [182 cm] tall and very heavy) and club feet. The hundreds of sketches which filled many sketchbooks kept during these trips were worked up into watercolours and, later, oil paintings for exhibition at the Royal Academy.

After his move to London in 1805, Glover also exhibited with the Society of Painters in Watercolour, to which he was elected a member shortly before the society’s first exhibition that April. The enormous success of the exhibition, and especially of Glover’s watercolours, ensured his fame and popularity as a watercolourist and instructor in this medium. The vogue for Glover was such that to his contemporaries he was seen as a serious rival to J.M.W. Turner. Glover was president of the society in 1807-08 but supported its dissolution and the formation in November 1812 of the Society of Painters in Oil and Watercolours.

Besides numerous trips to the Lake District of England, Glover travelled to France and Germany in 1814, and again to the Continent in 1817 when, in the company of Henry Curzon Allport, he visited Italy. Upon his return Glover submitted for membership of the Royal Academy but was scathingly rejected with references to his 'annual manufactory’. On 24 April 1820 Glover opened his own gallery at 16 Old Bond Street, London, to which his admirers flocked to buy his work, eventually making him a wealthy man. Yet, by the late 1820s Glover’s popularity was waning and the paintings he exhibited at the Society of British Artists (of which he had been a founding member in 1823) attracted increasingly virulent criticism.

After auctioning his paintings and selling his house, John Glover, his wife Sarah and their eldest son John, left England on 4 September 1830 aboard the Thomas Lawrie , bound for Hobart Town. Ink and watercolour miniature portraits of Sarah and their daughter Mary Bowles (who remained in England) were probably painted shortly before they emigrated (offered Christie’s Australian and European Paintings, Drawings and Prints, Part 1 , Melbourne 29 April 1997, cat.70). In Van Diemen’s Land the Glovers were to be reunited with their three younger sons, James, Henry and William, already engaged in farming. After a long and arduous passage, the Thomas Lawrie docked at Launceston on 18 February 1831. There Glover explored the surrounding countryside and sketched the Australian bush for the first time. On 1 April the ship reached Hobart Town. After purchasing a farm at Tea Tree Brush near Brighton and a house in Melville Street, Hobart, Glover was soon sketching and painting. His first Australian paintings were exhibited in London at the 1832 Society of British Artists Exhibition (Suffolk Street) and attracted much attention.

Glover’s application for a land grant was successful and on 12 March 1832 he and his family travelled overland north from Hobart to Deddington, near Ben Lomond, to the farm he named Patterdale in memory of the Lake District. While his sons worked the farm Glover sketched and painted, often travelling far afield. He ascended Ben Lomond on horseback and travelled to the remote Mount Olympus and Lake St Clair region, visiting many landowners on the way and making sketches. These were developed into some of Australia’s earliest oil homestead portraits. In 1835 Glover exhibited sixty-eight paintings at 106 New Bond Street, London. Thirty-eight were, as the catalogue states, 'descriptive of the scenery and customs of the inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land’; the others were of English and Italian subjects painted from the more than 140 sketchbooks he had brought with him. Suffering increasing difficulty with his sight, Glover painted less and less and few works are dated later than 1840. He died, aged eighty-two, on 9 December 1849 and was buried in the grounds of the Nonconformist chapel at Deddington.

Upon arriving in Van Diemen’s Land, Glover was confronted with a totally unfamiliar landscape, but this perhaps helped him to throw off the picturesque Claudean manner he had employed for so long. In both England and Europe he had studied Jacob van Ruisdael and the Dutch master was more relevant than Claude for his new subjects of aged eucalypts and unkempt bush. Glover again worked out of doors, developing an involvement with and understanding of the landscape. His direct experience of nature, both as a pioneer settler and painter, resulted in a fresh and vital approach.

His perception of the subtleties of colouring in the landscape resulted in the use of a more naturalistic palette. Olive-greens, ochres, misty greys and intense blues were employed, as well as the most subtle glazes in mauve, grey and gold to portray the peculiar nature of colour and light in the atmosphere, effects which eluded other landscape painters of the time. The bright clear sunshine made a strong impression upon him and the varying effects of light and shade and broad expanses of sunlit landscape beneath intense blue skies are accurately depicted. Similarly, the nature of the bush is well perceived, native eucalypts, blackwoods and wattles being painted to give a clear representation of their qualities and individuality.

Some of Glover’s paintings suggest more than just an accurate rendering of the Australian landscape, alluding as well to his belief in the insignificance of human endeavour and incorporating something of his own pantheistic vision. Cawood on the River Ouse (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery [TMAG]) depicts a large, established and wealthy homestead with much activity in the surrounding paddocks as minute within the grandeur of the seemingly infinite natural landscape. My Harvest Home (TMAG) shows the end of a successful harvest on Glover’s Patterdale farm and has in the western sky a blazing sun as an iconic presence. Other paintings employ rainbows, sunshine and deep shadow with strongly symbolic intent. The doomed race of Tasmanian Aborigines, no longer living in his neighbourhood by the time he painted them, are several times depicted beneath the remnants of a lurid sunset or a waning moon.

This romanticism, with its attendant symbolism, in Glover’s paintings cannot be denied; however, it is often obscured by the apparently naturalistic landscape setting. Several paintings have as their subject singular and venerable eucalypts. The choice of such seemingly informal subject-matter in the paintings Patterdale Landscape (Art Gallery of South Australia) and Landscape with Cattle (National Library of Australia) is indicative of Glover’s understanding of and respect for the qualities of the Australian bush and the majesty of an ancient eucalypt. Beneath this seeming realism is a new icon in Australian art.

Glover was unique among painters in Australia working in oils during the first half of the nineteenth century. For the first time the peculiar qualities of the bush—its trees, light and colours—are accurately portrayed in this medium with realistic detail. He found in the landscape’s apparent drabness and disorder a beauty and meaning relevant to his experience. At the same time Glover recognised images capable of expressing his wonder at and respect for the ancient continent of his adoption. His paintings are the first to realise and portray the eucalypt in its bushland setting as a peculiarly national symbol. In so doing he explored a theme that was to dominate Australian landscape painting in the latter half of the century.

Writers:

McPhee, John

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011