sketcher, lithographer, sculptor and publican, was the licensee of the Cremorne Gardens, Melbourne. He announced that this 'celebrated establishment’ and its beautiful gardens would be re-opening on 1 July 1855, now that he had finally managed to obtain a licence for it. Presumably while awaiting the permit, Macdona turned to making some money from his artistic talents although hitherto strictly an amateur (as both Melbourne newspapers pointed out). He produced a 'spirited’ lithographic print of the new ground of the Melbourne Cricket Club in February, 'dedicated to the members of the Club’.
Praised as 'a true likeness of the beautiful lawn’, this apparently flat subject was given a most enthusiastic review by the Age . Comments on its human interest were confined to pointing out that the Cricket Club members, especially, must greatly prize the work 'as the figures, representing a match played among themselves, are most of them intended for particular individuals’. But the landscape setting, especially the foliage, was thought splendid: 'Every artist knows who has ever attempted to draw an Australian tree, that the broken masses of foliage, so different from that of the European trees, require considerable practice and tact [sic] to prevent the picture being merely an aggregation of spots … a source of hindrance to the accomplishment of what, in artistic phraseology, is known as “breadth”. Mr Macdona has gone so far as to overcome this difficulty, and the “gum trees” in his drawing, while they have the required and generic form are so grouped and blended as to produce an effect as pleasing as the most luxuriant array of elms in the most aristocratic of English parks’.
Ironically, this very virtue would later be seen as a fatal flaw in colonial art—proof of the artist’s inability to see local vegetation except through 'English eyes’. Although the contemporary success of Macdona’s first professional foray is not known, the following year he appears to have taken up sculpture.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
Note:
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
