ELIZA THURSTON (1807-1873)
Blue Mountains (1,189m - 3, 901ft)
Australia (New South Wales)
In Blue Mountain, Victoria Pass Australia, oil on canvas, 1861, National Museum of Australia.
The mountain
The Blue Mountains of which the unnamed highest point culminate at 1,189m - 3, 901ft, are a mountainous region and a mountain range located in New South Wales, Australia. The region borders on Sydney's metropolitan area, its foothills starting about 50 kilometres (31 mi) west of the state capital. The public's understanding of the extent of the Blue Mountains is varied, as it forms only part of an extensive mountainous area associated with the Great Dividing Range. Officially the Blue Mountains region is bounded by the Nepean and Hawkesbury rivers in the east, the Coxs River and Lake Burragorang to the west and south, and the Wolgan and Colo rivers to the north. Geologically, it is situated in the central parts of the Sydney Basin.
The Blue Mountains Range comprises a range of mountains, plateau escarpments extending off the Great Dividing Range about 4.8 kilometres (3.0 mi) northwest of Wolgan Gap in a generally southeasterly direction for about 96 kilometres (60 mi), terminating at Emu Plains. For about two-thirds of its length it is traversed by the Great Western Highway and the Main Western railway line. Several established towns are situated on its heights, including Katoomba, Blackheath, Mount Victoria, and Springwood. The range forms the watershed between Coxs River to the south and the Grose and Wolgan rivers to the north. The range contains the Explorer Range and the Bell Range.
The artist
Thurston painted a number of landscape views in the area during the 1860s. Her best known work in a public collection shows a panorama of the Capertee Valley taken from the Mudgee Road from the Crown Ridge (now known as Blackmans Crown).
The inclusion of human figures on the lower left corner of the picture was a compositional device popular with artists at the time. These sightseers give the viewer foreground interest as well as a sense of scale which helped emphasize the monumental power of the picturesque subject matter in the background. While not a highly realistic rendering of the scene, Thurston's Mitchell Library work has great charm and shows that the panorama seen from the Crown was as popular then as it is today.
Eliza came from an established family of artists from Bath in western England. Eliza became an art teacher after she came to Australia in 1853. She lived for a few years during the mid to late 1860s with her (Mudgee based) photographer son Horatio Thurston (1838-1881). While resident there she produced her Capertee Valley works. She died in Sydney a few years later. Her daughter, Eliza West Thurston, was an amateur artist who painted mostly floral subjects. She worked as a teacher in Rylstone and spent her later years living in Mudgee.