New Worlds From Old

nineteenth century Australian and American landscapes

National Gallery of Victoria

3 June - 10 August 1998

This unique exhibition of one hundred of the most significant landscape paintings ever produced in both Australia and America explores how artists steeped in 'old world' traditions reacted when confronted by landscapes of the 'new world'. It presents the historical and cultural context of painting being done on either side of the Pacific and the changing nature of landscape. Compare a John Glover painting from 1836 of Aborigines ar Risden with a Thomas Cole painting from ten years earlier of an autumnal scene in the Catskills.

"American audiences are going to be set on their ear by this show"

Robert Hughes

"The fantastic light of Frederic Church can gleam in Nicholas Chevalier at Mount Arapiles. William Merritt Chase assaying the summery dunes of Shinnecock on Long Island recalls Charles Condor or Arthur Streeton at Heidelberg or by Port Phillip Bay.

American travellers find themselves in a curiously ironical and paradoxical situation: the physical experience of Australia is exciting and pleasurably different; the discovery of Australian art reveals a fasciniating familiarity.

What connects the Australian to the American experience is a kind of imaginative awakening . . ."

Patrick McCaughey