Deutscher and Hackett

When Sassafras, 1926 was first unveiled in Arthur Streeton’s exhibition at The Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, the art critic for The Sydney Morning Herald hailed the show as being ‘representative of his best style – mellow toned, strongly realistic, and skilfully composed.’¹ Of the many landscapes, he wrote, ‘Almost without exception, they are bathed in that brilliant, warm light which is so characteristic of Australia, as compared with the broken and colder glow that usually rests on landscapes in England.’ The chief painting in the exhibition was City of laughing loveliness, Sun-girdled Queen, 1921 – a captivating view of Sydney Harbour. Sassafras appealed so greatly to (later Sir) Marcus Clark, then one of Australia’s leading art collectors, that he added it to his already substantial holding of Streeton’s paintings. Indeed, Clark possessed an outstanding collection of Australian and British art representing the proverbial ‘who’s who’ of the time, including Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Rupert Bunny, George Lambert, Elioth Gruner, Julius Olsson R.A., Sir John Lavery R.A., A.J. Munnings A.R.A. and many others. His Roberts was the stunning Holiday Sketch at Coogee, 1888 (now in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales), with an equally vibrant work by Bunny, The Green Caterpillar, 1910 (formerly on long term loan to the Art Gallery of New South Wales). His collection aroused such interest that, after a Sydney showing in 1923, it toured Tasmania from June to September of 1926, being exhibited in Hobart at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, and at Launceston. Five works by Streeton were featured in the Tasmanian exhibition, and years later another six examples, including the present Sassafras, were included in the major Streeton Memorial Exhibition held at the National Gallery of New South Wales in 1945.
 
Painted in the same richly productive year as Land of the Golden Fleece, 1926 (private collection), Sassafras offers an engaging lyrical setting for a theme that was to occupy the artist in his later years – namely, his deep concern for the future of the Dandenong Ranges and their majestic gum trees. Into the grandeur of the panoramic scene of Sassafras with its majestic and overarching sky of blue and clouds of plenty, Streeton introduces that wanton destruction seen in the vertical reach of dead trees and fallen timbers among the living. Such deforestation is symbolised by the striking image of the remains of a once noble gum, slain in the foreground like some sacrificial victim. Its poignancy is heightened by the natural beauty of the scene and its bravura translation into paint. Streeton had moved to his new home ‘Longacres’ at Olinda in the Dandenongs in 1924. Here he continued to paint pictures of panoramic beauty and abundance. The year before he painted Sassafras, he gave an address to the Forest League titled ‘Australian Trees and Art’. He questioned why ‘should we suffer hundreds and hundreds of acres of valuable timber to be destroyed to facilitate some work of the moment when so little is gained for it?’² The theme continued in such masterly works as Last of the messmates, 1928 (private collection); The vanishing forest, 1934 (Art Gallery of Ballarat, on loan from the Estate of Margery Pierce) and particularly, the confronting Sylvan Dam and Donna Buang AD 2000, 1940 (private collection) where Streeton not only starkly documents the damage being wreaked on the natural world, but condemns with growing vehemence the commercial motivations underlying it.
 
1. ‘Oil Paintings. Mr. Streeton’s Exhibition’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 10 March 1927, p. 6
2. Argus, Melbourne, 27 November 1925, p. 23, cited in Mary Eagle, The Oil Paintings of Arthur Streeton in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994, p. 164