EUGENE VON GUERARD (1811-1901)
Mount William or Mount Duwil (1, 167 m - 3, 829 ft)
Australia
In Mount William seen from Mount Dryden,1857, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Australia
The mountain
Mount William also called Mount Duwil (1, 167 m - 3, 829 ft) is the highest point within the Grampians Mountain Range, (Grampians National Park) in the Australian state of Victoria. The mountain is situated approximately 250 kilometres (160 mi) west-north-west of Melbourne on the eastern edge of the national park, approximately 22 kilometres (14 mi) drive from Halls Gap.In 1836, sir Thomas Mitchell was the first man to reached the summit with a group of explorers i. The first settler in the area was Horatio Wills, who established a sheep run at Mount William in 1840, and named nearby Mount Ararat, after which the town is named. His son, cricketer and Australian rules football pioneer Tom Wills, grew up as a lone white child among the Djab wurrung Aboriginal tribes of Mount William. Three transmission towers are located at the summit of Mount William including an amateur radio repeater. A sealed service road continues to the summit, but is not accessible by vehicle to the general public.
Visitors to the mountain can drive to a carpark located approximately 920 metres (3,020 ft) up the mountain, before proceeding on foot for 1.8 kilometres (1.1 mi) to the summit. It will take a person of moderate fitness approximately 45 mins to walk. No permit is required to climb the mountain.
Source:
- Grampians National Park
The painter
Johann Joseph Eugene von Guerard was an Austrian-born artist, active in Australia from 1852 to 1882. Known for his finely detailed landscapes in the tradition of the Düsseldorf school of painting, he is represented in Australia's major public galleries, and is referred to in the country as Eugene von Guerard. In 1852 von Guerard arrived in Victoria, Australia, determined to try his luck on the Victorian goldfields. As a gold-digger he was not very successful, but he did produce a large number of intimate studies of goldfields life, quite different from the deliberately awe-inspiring landscapes for which he was later to become famous. Realizing that there were opportunities for an artist in Australia, he abandoned the diggings and was soon undertaking commissions recording the dwellings and properties of wealthy pastoralists.
By the early 1860s, von Guerard was recognized as the foremost landscape artist in the colonies, touring Southeast Australia and New Zealand in pursuit of the sublime and the picturesque. He is most known for the wilderness paintings produced during this time, which are remarkable for their shadowy lighting and fastidious detail. Indeed, his View of Tower Hill in south-western Victoria was used as a botanical template over a century later when the land, which had been laid waste and polluted by agriculture, was systematically reclaimed, forested with native flora and made a state park. The scientific accuracy of such work has led to a reassessment of von Guerard's approach to wilderness painting, and some historians believe it likely that the landscapist was strongly influenced by the environmental theories of the leading scientist Alexander von Humboldt. Others attribute his 'truthful representation' of nature to the criterion for figure and landscape painting set by the Düsseldorf Academy.
In 1866 his Valley of the Mitta Mitta was presented to the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne; in 1870 the trustees purchased his Mount Kosciusko shown in this article was titled "Northeast view from the northern top of Mount Kosciusko", which is actually "from Mount Townsend".
In 2006, the City of Greater Geelong purchased his 1856 painting View of Geelong for A$3.8M. His painting, Yalla-y-Poora, is in the Joseph Brown Collection on display at the National Gallery of Victoria. The State Library of New South Wales in Sydney holds an extensive collection of working sketchbooks by Eugene von Guerard, as well as larger drawings and paintings and a diary. The sketchbooks cover regions as diverse as Italy and Germany, Tasmania, New South Wales, and of course, Victoria.
In 1870 von Guerard was appointed the first Master of the School of Painting at the National Gallery of Victoria, where he was to influence the training of artists for the next 11 years. His reputation, high at the beginning of this period, had faded somewhat towards the end because of his rigid adherence to picturesque subject matter and detailed treatment in the face of the rise of the more intimate Heidelberg School style. Amongst his pupils were Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts. Von Guerard retired from his position at the National Gallery School the end of 1881 and departed for Europe in January 1882. In 1891 his wife died. Two years later, he lost his investments in the Australian bank crash and he lived in poverty until his death in Chelsea, London, on 17 April 1901.
Several paintings of mountains of Australia and New Zealand by Eugène von Guerard are published in this blog....
Sources:
- Dictionnary of Australian Artists, Oxford University Press, 1992
