ARTHUR STREETON Australian, 1867-1943

Collection of William Grant Buckle (1894-1947), Sydney; thence by descent

Private collection, Perth

Possibly The Arthur Streeton Catalogue, Arthur Streeton, Melbourne, 1935, cat. 195 as 'Wheatfield', 1898, oil, 14 by 10 inches, owned by Mr Shakespear

Departing from Australia early in 1897, Streeton was determined to try his fortune in London. Tom Roberts and other artist friends had urged him to go, with the advice not only that he needed to see paintings by great European masters, but also to pit his own work against the best of his international contemporaries.

Hayfield, Kent may well date from Streeton’s second English summer when he spent some time out of the city painting landscapes. In subject matter it recalls his earlier haymaking scene, Australian December of 1887 – the first major painting he had ever exhibited, back in Melbourne a decade before. However the mood is more bucolic; the English sunlight is warm but not harsh.  During the summer of 1898 he wrote home to Roberts: ‘I feel convinced that my work hereafter will contain a larger idea & quality than before… I’m evolving & should I return I’d never paint Australia in exactly the same way…  I know more now – & would touch it more poetically’.¹

As Mary Eagle observes, Streeton’s small number of harvesting scenes, produced intermittently through a long career, ‘detach themselves as a group within the artist’s oeuvre. They are mostly small in size, vividly observed and brushed with cheerful confidence’.² Interestingly, Dr Eagle also points out that there has been some confusion as to whether the haymaking scenes dated from 1898 to 1906 were from the artist’s painting trips to Kent or Surrey or Sussex or Suffolk. In a letter of 1898, and when sending paintings for exhibition in 1899, he placed the 1898 harvests in Sussex; but years later, when preparing his 1935 catalogue, he changed this to Kent.³ Streeton’s Sussex Harvest was shown at the Royal Academy in London in 1899 and is now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Kent Harvest, c. 1904, is in the National Gallery of Australia. This present painting may have originally been titled simply ‘Wheatfield’ in The Arthur Streeton Catalogue, and been given the present, more topographically specific title, Hayfield, Kent by Mr W. G. Buckle, the important Sydney collector in whose family it has since remained. Mr Buckle owned a number of important works by Streeton, Roberts, Charles Conder and other Australian impressionists.

1. 28 June 1898; in Galbally, A. and Gray, A., Letters from Smike: the Letters of Arthur Streeton 1890-1943, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989 p. 78.

2. Eagle, M., The Oil paintings of Arthur Streeton in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994, p. 146.

3. Eagle, op. cit., p. 145.