The Mitre Rock and lake from Mt Arapiles, 1874
Eugene Von Guérard
oil on canvas
61.0 x 106.7 cm
signed and dated lower right: E. v. Guerard 1874
Sir George Verdon, Melbourne, commissioned and acquired directly from the artist, 1874
Catalogue of ... art furniture, marble statuary, real bronzes, art treasures, oil paintings, water colour drawings, fine old engravings, etc collected by Sir George Verdon, KCMG, CB., Gemmell, Tuckett & Co., Melbourne, 1 June 1891, lot 335 [unsold]
Private collection, a gift from the above c.1891
Thence by descent
Private collection, Melbourne
Private collection, London, acquired in the late 1980s
Eugen von Guérard, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, with the Australian National Gallery, Canberra and the Australian Gallery Directors Council, 7 June – 13 July 1980, then touring to: Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, August 1980; Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Victoria, September – October 1980; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, November 1980 and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, December 1980 – January 1981
Nicholls, C. F. (ed.), Victorian Men of the Time, Melbourne, 1877, p. 75 (as ‘View of Mitre Lake’)
Catalogue of Oil Paintings, Public Library, Museums and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1879, p. 15 (as ‘Lake and Mitre Rock’)
Collection of Sir George Verdon, K.C.M.G., C.B., Auction Catalogue, Gemmell, Tuckett & Company, Melbourne, 1 June 1894, lot 335 (as ‘Mitre Head’)
Bruce, C., Eugen von Guérard, Australian National Gallery & Director's Council, Canberra, 1980, pp. 57 (illus.), 81, 116 (illus.)
Bruce, C., Comstock, E., & McDonald, F., Eugene von Guerard 1811 – 1901: A German Romantic in the Antipodes, Alister Taylor Publishers, New Zealand, 1982, cat. 149, pl. 41, pp. 150, 262, 263
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When von Guérard saw this view on 16 October 1868, it must have surpassed his wildest expectations. He had seen it illustrated in Major Thomas Mitchell’s Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia (1839), but nothing could have prepared him for the immense vastness he experienced from the rocky heights of Mount Arapiles – so named by Mitchell in 1836, but known as Dyurrite to the people of the Wotjobaluk Nations, for whom it is a place of deep cultural, spiritual and historical significance.1
Dyurrite (Mt Arapiles) is a massive, resistant formation of quartzite, metamorphosed from sandstone, that rises steeply from the Wimmera Plains north-west of the Grampians (Gariwerd). For von Guérard, from his elevated vantage point about 100 metres below what is today the Bluff Point Picnic Area and Lookout, the sheer magnitude of this landscape – the seemingly endless open expanse of plains to the north, below equally immense skies – was breathtaking. At the same time, from this vantage point, the physical impact of the monumental rock forms would have been palpable and, at such close range, every fissure, cleft and crevice visible. In the middle distance was the Mitre Rock, described by James Smith, critic for The Argus, as rising ‘like some old Druidical monument.’2 Behind it lay the shallow salt Mitre Lake, clouds reflected in its still blue waters, and beyond, the first of the twenty-seven circular lakes that Mitchell had seen to the north-east. Under a makeshift tent – there had been rain showers that morning – von Guérard settled down to draw, working from 10 am until 4 pm and producing the large pencil and pastel drawing upon which The Mitre Rock and Lake from Mount Arapiles is based.
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Von Guérard (1811 – 1901), an experienced artist with a passionate and scientifically informed interest in the natural world, arrived in Melbourne in 1852 with years of travel and training in Italy and Germany behind him. He came ‘in the hope of finding an unexplored field for study’ and, on often intrepid sketching expeditions into the furthest reaches of Australia’s southeastern colonies, he did just that.3 By the end of the decade, his reputation – in the words of Smith, the leading art critic of the day – as ‘decidedly the landscape painter of Australia’ was established.
Von Guérard’s desire to see Dyurrite (Mt Arapiles) dated back to his early days in the colony when he had made copies, on tracing paper, of the illustrations of Mitre Rock and Lake from Mount Arapiles, and Mount Arapiles from Mitre Lake, both published in Mitchell’s Three Expeditions.4 Further impetus came with the return of fellow artist, Nicholas Chevalier, and German geophysicist, Georg von Neumayer, from their trip to the site in 1862. Von Guérard had travelled with them on the first leg of the 1862 expedition, led by Neumayer as part of his magnetic survey of Victoria and he would have been keenly interested to hear Neumayer’s account of the ‘commanding’ view ‘towards the North, over Mallee scrub and large salt-lakes in whose still waters everything is reflected like reality itself’ and to see Chevalier’s paintings, including his Mount Arapiles and the Mitre Rock, 1863 (National Gallery of Australia).5 On his 1868 expedition he saw the work again, hanging in a ‘lovely big room’ at Alexander Wilson’s station, Vectis, very close to the subject it represented. The neighbouring St Mary’s Lake Station, owned by the Wilson brothers and managed by ‘Mr McDonald’ was about a two hour walk to Dyurrite (Mt Arapiles) and it became the artist’s base for the next four days. There, along with milk straight from the cow at breakfast, mutton, potatoes, bread pudding, tea and friendly company and music in the evenings, were the fleas that disrupted his nights.6
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Von Guérard painted two views from elevated vantage points on Dyurrite (Mt Arapiles) – one looking to the south-east, Arapiles towards the Grampians, 1870 (Hamilton Gallery), and the present, looking to the north-east, The Mitre Rock and Lake from Mount Arapiles. For this subject, an important one for the artist, von Guérard prepared well, traversing the ground-level terrain that he would draw from above on the following day. He noted the beauty of the landscape, its trees (including the characteristic pines), saw kangaroos and five or six eagles, studied the Mitre Rock, and observed she-oak growing in a cleft near its peak (visible in the painting). When, from an elevation of around 726 feet (221 metres), he came to draw – and later to paint – this landscape, it was a topography that he knew, in all its detail and from multiple perspectives.
The final composition for The Mitre Rock and Lake from Mount Arapiles was resolved in the drawing made at the site – the result of the artist’s considered choice of vantage point. From here he saw the juxtapositions that would bring drama to his composition – the abrupt shifts from the near to the far, from soaring heights and to plunging depths, and between microscopic minute detail and panoramic breadth. The ‘near’, the detailed and geologically accurate portrayal of rocks, was integral to von Guérard’s vision of landscape painting. Like his Düsseldorf contemporaries, and as argued by the German art theorist Carl Gustav Carus, he understood that through the close and penetrating depiction of rocks, it was possible to convey something of their geological history. When he drew the rock stack known by climbers as ‘The Pharos’ and the wall of eroded column-like forms of the Pinnacle Face to its left, he hacked out every cleft, crevice and fracture of their surfaces with his pencil, seemingly describing the ‘strong physical erosion of coastal exposures’ that geologists today believe occurred during ‘the marine incursion of the late Miocene’ when Dyurrite (Mt Arapiles) was an island.7 The iron-oxide alterations on the rocks appear on the drawing as touches of red-brown pastel, and the gnarled, pebbly character of the rocks on the left is registered in tiny angular strokes. The free-standing Pharos is separated from the ‘mainland’ by a 100-metre-deep chasm, its monumental scale suggested by the two small figures on the ledge between The Pharos and the Pinnacle Face. The delightful white and purple flowering bushes (Erica and Prostanthera roduntifolia?), probably painted under magnification, bring the foreground even closer to the picture plane, accentuating the dramatic shift into deep pictorial space.
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In his review, Smith noted the challenges of a composition in which ‘the eye is carried down a sheer descent of so many hundred feet, that the forest trees upon the slopes shrink to the dimensions of shrubs, and the sheep [to] so many white dots.’ This, and the perspectival challenges of depicting ‘so extensive a scene from a lofty elevation’, were ‘completely overcome’ by the artist.8 The transition to the middle ground is established through the connection between The Pharos and the subject of the painting, the Mitre Rock. Behind that, the composition opens out to the glorious sweeping form of the lake and beyond, to the blues and violets of the far horizon. The warm tones cast by the late afternoon sun unify the composition, tinging the clouds with pink and casting shadows over the gentle undulations of the plain. Above them, eagles soar – as witnessed by von Guérard on the day. The minutiae of nature is integrated into a composition of expansive breadth and grandeur and we, from our privileged position high above that of the figures below, have the sense of ‘everything’ being within our field of vision – even to the detail of the Tiptoe Ridge, the tiny pinnacle visible at the top of the peak on the left. For Smith it exemplified ‘ars celare artem’ – ‘it is (true) art to conceal art’ – and he congratulated Sir George Verdon (1834 – 1896) on the commission and acquisition of ‘a very fine picture.’
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Verdon commissioned The Mitre Rock and Lake from Mount Arapiles in 1874, his second year as a Trustee of the Public Library, Museums and National Gallery of Victoria, and von Guérard’s fourth as, in effect, the Gallery’s Director. His fellow Trustee, J. A. MacPherson had commissioned the smaller companion view, von Guérard’s Mount Arapiles towards the Grampians, four years earlier – a work sold by Deutscher and Hackett in September 2022, and now in the collection of the Hamilton Gallery. Along with a career as a politician and a successful banker, the public-spirited Verdon had a strong interest in the arts: he served as a Trustee from 1872 until 1896; as Vice President in 1880 and President from 1883 until 1896; the Verdon Gallery on the building’s south wing was named in honour of him; and he was the force behind the beautiful English Gothic Revival banking chamber, designed by William Wardell, now housing the ANZ Bank. When von Guérard offered his collection of coins and medals to the Gallery in 1881, it was Verdon who approved the purchase.9
Von Guérard’s Mitre Rock and Lake from Mount Arapiles has not been on public view in Australia since 1980, when it featured in the Australian National Gallery’s landmark exhibition, Eugen von Guérard 1980 – an exhibition that played a critical role in restoring von Guérard to his rightful place as one of Australia’s greatest and most enduringly significant landscape painters.
1. Dyurrite Cultural Landscape, Barengi Gadjin Land Council, Aboriginal Corporation, see: https://www.dyurrite.com.au ‘Mount Arapiles’ was so named because 23 July, the day Mitchell climbed the mount, was the anniversary of the Battle of Salamanca.
2. Smith, J., The Argus, Melbourne, 9 November 1874, p. 5
3. Smith, J., Victorian Men of the Time in Australia, M’Carron, Bird & Co., Melbourne, 1882, p. 75
4. Mitchell, T. L., Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, T. & W. Boone, London, 1839, vol. II, plate 31 and p. 191
5. Georg von Neumayer, ‘Narrative of the Various Trips and Excursions in connexon with the Magnetic Survey’, in Results of the Magnetic Survey of Victoria 1858 – 64, Mannheim, 1869, p. 64
6. [Diary notes], Eugene von Guérard Sketchbook XXXVI, 1867 – 68 - 69, Dixson Galleries, State Library of NSW, Sydney, DGB16, vol 14a, ff. [83], [84]
7. R.A. Cayley and D.H. Taylor, Grampians: Special Map Area Geological Report, Geological Survey Report 107, Natural Resources and Environment, 1997, p. 16
8. Smith, The Argus, op. cit.
9. Gregory, J., Before Felton: The Collections of the National Gallery of Victoria before 1904, see: https://www.beforefelton.com/
DR RUTH PULLIN
The author is grateful to Keith Lockwood for his assistance and his photograph, taken from von Guérard’s vantage point.