Early summer – gorse in bloom

Arthur Streeton's Early Summer — Gorse in Bloom (1888) is one of his most lyric Heidelberg period works — depicting the introduced European gorse shrub blazing golden-yellow on the Australian hillside. Gorse had been brought to Australia by settlers as hedging and quickly naturalized, its brilliant flowers transforming the Victorian landscape in spring with a distinctly European color that paradoxically became part of the Australian visual world. Streeton's painting captures this botanical colonialism with delight rather than irony: the gorse's golden intensity was exactly the kind of saturated color note he sought in his plein air work.

The gorse's brilliant yellow presented Streeton with a pure chromatic challenge: how to render such intense local color within the bleached ochre palette of the Australian summer landscape without losing the plein air freshness of direct observation. His solution involves thick, confident strokes of cadmium yellow and golden ochre for the gorse bloom, contrasted with the pale blue-white of the Australian sky and the grey-green of surrounding scrub. The painting's small format — characteristic of the Heidelberg plein air studies — allows direct, unrevised handling.