Pastoral

Arthur Streeton's Pastoral (1888) belongs to his early Heidelberg period when he was developing the Australian landscape vision that would make him the defining painter of the Australian countryside. The pastoral subject — grazing land, possibly sheep, the rolling hills of the Victorian countryside — placed him in a long tradition of pastoral landscape painting while insisting on the specifically Australian qualities of his setting: the bleached ochre grass of the Australian summer, the blue-white sky, the distinctive eucalyptus tree forms. His Australia was pastoral in subject but entirely original in visual character.

Streeton renders the pastoral landscape with the light-keyed palette and direct brushwork that was becoming his signature. The Australian summer light blanches color from the landscape — the grass is pale ochre rather than the rich green of English pastoral, the sky is a blue-white rather than deep English blue. His brushwork captures this quality of bleached outdoor light with confident, direct strokes. The composition is characteristically horizontal — the flat Australian pastoral landscape allowing the sky to expand above a minimal earth band.