Great Australian Paintings

The paintings which have established a permanent place in the Australian heritage are usually those which depict the ‘typical’ Australian landscape or express an aspect of Australian character.

This is the common denominator which surpasses the changes in genre, style and time and links such paintings as Tom Roberts’ The Breakaway, Arthur Boyd’s Wimmera Landscape, Sir Hans Heysen’s Spring Early Morning, Russell Drysdale’s The Rabbiters and William Dobell’s The Billy Boy.

Paintings themselves emerge as valuable, known and loved works, but it would be impossible to present GREAT AUSTRALIAN PAINTINGS on the basis of judgement of individual paintings.

Rather, this book is a salute to the founders of Australian traditions in art, artists whose successors are even now enriching that tradition in new ways.

The first great school of Australian painting is well represented in this volume. This was the ‘golden era’ of painting in the 1880’s and 1890’s, the time of artists like Roberts, Conder, Streeton and McCubbin. With the light of the French Impressionist movement, they were the first to capture the true vision of the country, to break away from the idealised interpretations that went before.

This work has been followed, with no less distinction, by the painters of this age–Dobell, Drysdale, Nolan, Boyd and others, each discovering and illuminating a new element in Australian landscape or scene. The 55 colour plates in this book are representative of the best known paintings of artists who are international in their stature, but distinctly ‘Australian’ in their painting.