Eugene Von Guérard: Nature Revealed

The beauty of the Australian landscape is celebrated in the Queensland Art Gallery’s newest exhibition Nature Revealed, a showcase of significant paintings and sketches by iconic landscape artist Eugene Von Guérard. Von Guérard’s works are not only exquisitely detailed scenes of Australian geography and geology, but are also important historical images that provide snapshots of a 19th century Australia for our own environmental posterity.

The exhibition presents early sketches by the artist alongside those of his father, Bernard Von Guérard, with an obvious affinity for the natural world shared between the two. From early pencil sketches to highly detailed oil paintings, Eugene developed a uniquely intricate style that not only captured the nuances of colour and light of Australian landscapes, but also mood and atmosphere. It is difficult to say whether the artistic atmosphere was injected by the artist or whether he was simply replicating the atmosphere of his immediate natural surroundings, but each image possesses a unique ambiance which is strangely familiar given that Von Guérard painted Australian landscapes with a European eye.

With spider-like branches curving through yellow horizons, Von Guérard’s style appears to combine reality and imagination in paintings that are highly realistic but also often slightly surreal. It is with this combination of melancholy and mastery that Nature Revealed not only shows viewers the beauty of Australian landscapes through the skill of academic painting, but also the beauty of perception and the difference between what we see before us and what we wish to see.

Eugene Von Guérard: Nature Revealed
Queensland Art Gallery
December 17, 2011, to March 3, 2012

Below: watch a video on Von Guérard from the National Gallery of Australia.