19th century AD

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1998 by Amy Ellis

Historically, Australia and the United States have much in common and much that is different. They were both British colonies (Australia remains part of the British Commonwealth to this day, although it did become a federation in 1901). The United States was settled in part by religious dissidents, while Australia served as a penal colony for British convicts. In both countries white settlers came close to wiping out the native populations who predated them. The white Australia policy of the latter half of the nineteenth century is comparable to the American xenophobia that gained momentum about the same time.

Geographically, the two countries are quite different. Australia, a much older land mass than the United States, is flatter and less mountainous, and because its climate, which is very dry, is less varied, there are large areas of desert. Any deciduous trees now growing in Australia were imported. The basic geography of each country also dictated the patterns of European settlement. In Australia, the Gmat Dividing Range along the east coast for the most part barred inland settlement until after 1813, while in the United States, settlement spread relentlessly westward, stopped only briefly by the Sierra Nevada in California.

A number of conditions contributed to the creation and reception of landscape painting in Australia and the United States in the nineteenth century. Artists claimed to be depicting the newly European-settled world as different from the Old World, but they drew on European conventions of landscape painting to make the new seem more familiar. Although attracted by the exotic - the wilderness, natural wonders, and native peoples of the new worlds - they also felt a need to remain in control of what was foreign in the landscape, to colonize it in effect. It was perhaps this impulse that led American and Australian artists to create visually similar landscape paintings. Artists in both countries were also influenced by such intellectual developments as the burgeoning study of natural history in the mid-nineteenth century, exemplified by the publications of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and Charles Darwin (1809-1882).(1) Moreover, they drew on a common visual language, for example using figures of native inhabitants to convey meaning; in both places natives were portrayed from ethnographic, symbolic, and sentimental points of view.

European settlers in both Australia and the United States identified the waterfall as not only a visually interesting subject but also as a powerful symbol, much as they had at home. Niagara Fails was particularly famous in the United States, where it was seen both as a symbol of divinity and of the country's potential.(2) Frederic Edwin Church's panoramic view of the falls (Pl. I), with its focus on the powerful rush of water over Horseshoe Fall, was deemed an especially successful statement of the promise - political, economic, and technological - of the New World. With the approach of the Civil War, the site became an even stronger icon, especially when pictured unmediated by human figures.

Kaaterskill Falls, two tiers dropping more than 260 feet, in the Catskill Mountains of New York State, epitomized the awe-inspiring aspects of nature defined as the sublime by such English writers as Edmund Burke (1729-1797). One nineteenth-century writer proclaimed Kaaterskill one of "the prodigies and fearful wonders of the Almighty"(3) By the time Thomas Cole and William Guy Wall painted the site in the mid-1820s, the falls were already a tourist attraction, with a number of hotels springing up nearby and scaffolding and viewing platforms built around the falls themselves.(4) While Cole eschewed any indication of tourism, choosing instead to picture a lone American Indian as a symbol of the American past and the disappearing wilderness (Pl. III), the only figures Wall included were a group of tourists, seen from his vantage point inside a cavern behind the upper tier of the falls (Pl. II).

Compare these American views to Augustus Earle's Wentworth Falls (Pl. IV) of about 1830, depicting a cataract in the Blue Mountains - part of the Great Dividing Range - in Australia's New South Wales. Admired like Niagara and Kaaterskill Falls as an expression of the sublime, until the advent of the railroad in 1867, Wentworth Falls was nothing more than a scenic site at the halfway point on the coach route between Sydney and Bathurst.(5) Earle's image, painted after he returned to England and thus with an English audience in mind, includes two Aborigines, a self-portrait showing him taking the likeness of one of the Aborigines, and four whites clambering on the ledge at the right. At this time there were few Aborigines living in the region, for they had been driven out by white explorers, and those pictured by Earle were probably guides, not intended to be romantic symbols of the past. Earle has depicted the natives and the whites in a cooperative enterprise - both contemporaries in the landscape and both visitors to it.(6)