Making a Scene

Drawn by Albert Cooke (1836-1902) and engraved by George Collingridge de Tourcey (1847-1931), this magnificently detailed scene was created in 1891. Deft eyes, steady hands, a kit of assorted tools, and experience, were critical to its making. Albert and George also collaborated on a similar view of Sydney a year earlier, and Cooke made a […]

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Sketching a Bloody Coastline

Wounded at the end of the bloody campaign at Gallipoli, Lieutenant Leith MC was evacuated to a hospital ship. Anchored offshore at Cape Helles, Leith sketched his view. What he recorded was not just the landscape but the final weeks of the failed allied campaign at Gallipoli to crush Germany’s ally, the Ottoman Empire. Near […]

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Silken Diplomacy

Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Chifley liked to knit. On the wall of her rendered brick cottage at 10 Busby Street, Bathurst, nearby the comfortable sage green armchair where she often sat to pursue her craft, this beautiful Chinese scroll had been hanging since about 1948. Lizzie was Prime Minister Ben Chifley’s wife, and this was their home, […]

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A Fancy Frame

Born and raised at Kangaroo Valley near Nowra, Elsie Campbell (1883-1962) was twenty-seven when she set her mind and hands to making this picture frame in 1910. She crafted it using a technique known as ornamental leather work, also considered a type of ‘fancy work’. Unlike her three older sisters who preferred to embroider floral […]

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A Reproduced Idyll

When the young Birmingham artist Arthur Henry Fullwood (1863-1930) arrived in Maitland in 1886, what were his first impressions? Having recently migrated to the colony, Fullwood was commissioned by the Picturesque Atlas Publishing Company in Sydney to travel to the Hunter Region and depict its principal town, Maitland.  Among the various locations Fullwood visited in […]

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An Ingenious and Elegant Artist

Alfred William Eustace (1820-1907) was born in England and came to Australia with his wife Sarah and children in 1851. Among his paintings he recorded the first paddle steamer to arrive at Albury in 1855, as well as a painting of the Woolshed gold rush, one of only two known paintings of this gold field. […]

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The Flow of Time

Judith White’s (1951-) view of the Hunter River at Maitland is painted in a most appropriate medium – watercolour. White has used the transparent washes of paint to suggest the smoothly gliding waters of the river and its reflection of the stormy sky above. The massing, dense clouds threaten to burst at any minute with […]

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Brainfog

After an artist residency in Beirut in 1999, Locust Jones (1963-) had a realisation: he had the story all wrong. Through his time in Lebanon, it became clear that his understanding of the region had been founded upon a deep, unnoticed bias in the media he had been consuming. From then on, his work became […]

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