JOHN GLOVER British, 1767-1849

Richard Temple-Grenville, 3rd Duke of Buckingham and Marquess of Chandos (1823-1889);

by descent to his daughter, Mary, Baroness of Kinloss, until sold by the Buckingham Will Trust, Jackson Stops, [exact date still unclear] 1921, lot 1734

Christie's, London, 15 April 1988, lot 68, as 'Sunset, a mountainous Lake landscape with a boy fishing'

Private collection, United Kingdom

Private collection, Australia

John Glover is undoubtedly one of the greatest painters of the early colonial era in Australia. Indeed he is ranked as one of the most important landscape artists of his generation working outside Europe. Born in Leicestershire in 1767, a contemporary of both John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, Glover enjoyed a highly successful career in England painting landscapes, most often in an idealised classical style but also at times in a realist mode. In 1830 three emigrant sons were already farming near Hobart, and he resolved to join them. He reached Van Diemen's Land on his sixty-fourth birthday, 18 February 1831, and remained there for the rest of his life.

Judging from paintings Glover produced in both England and Australia, he had a marked predilection for weather-induced light effects – dramatic shafts of golden sunshine and the coloured arches of rainbows – what Constable’s friend and mentor Sir George Beaumont called ‘ingenious... effects of rays, etc’.¹ For his London exhibition of 1835, he sent back from Tasmania Ben Lomond at Sunset, Mount Wellington at Sun rise, Sun set: A View from Mill’s Plains and Sun Rise: Shropshire. His Italianate Landscape with a Sybil’s Temple: Composition of 1816, now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, includes a wonderfully theatrical sunset. Perhaps best known among his sunset subjects is My Harvest Home, 1835, depicting his own farm at ‘Patterdale’ at the close of a long summer’s day.²

The original title of this large and beautiful landscape is not recorded, but it was possibly one of the English Lake District views Glover sent from Tasmania in 1835. The dimensions of the canvas match those of most his major Tasmanian works. Dr David Hansen, who first saw the painting in an English collection five years ago, suggests that either number 54 in Glover’s 1835 list, ‘Mill Crag near Bassenthwaite, Cumberland’, or number 54, ‘Langdale Pikes. Cumberland’, are possibilities. The sun is setting on the right-hand side of the composition: so Glover’s view is from the north. Glover painted a number of Lake District subjects during his Australian years, working from sketchbooks he had brought with him from England which indicate at least nine tours to the area between 1793 and 1824.

The first documented owner of the painting was the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, in whose Estate it was recorded in 1921. This was probably Richard Temple-Grenville, 3rd Duke of Buckingham and Marquess of Chandos, who served as Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1867-8. Interestingly, the same family is known to have bought a number of Glover’s pictures in London. For example, Hansen has noted watercolours of Caernarvon purchased for 20 guineas by the ‘Earl [sic] of Buckingham’ – probably the 1st Duke of Buckingham and Chandos (1776-1839) – from the Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1809; as well as ‘New Bridge over the River Conway’, in 1810 and ‘Lancaster after sun set’ for ten guineas in 1815.

We are most grateful to Dr David Hansen for assistance in cataloguing this work.

1. Quoted in Garlick, K. and McIntyre, A. (eds), The Diary of Joseph Farington, Yale Center for British Art & Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art, New Haven and London, 1978-84, vol. IV, p.134.

2. See Hansen, D., John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and Art Exhibitions Australia, Hobart, 2003, pp. 170 and 216. Glover’s Catalogue of Sixty-Eight Pictures Descriptive of the Scenery & Customs of the Inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land, together with Views of England, Italy, &c. is reprinted in John McPhee’s The Art of John Glover,  Macmillan, Melbourne, 1980, pp. 32-35.