ARTHUR STREETON Australian, 1867-1943

Collection of Norman Schureck (inscribed on reverse of frame) by 1945; until The Norman Schureck Collection of Valuable Pictures, James R. Lawson, Sydney, 27 - 28 March 1962, lot 86 as 'The Artist's Garden'

Private collection

Australian Historical and Contemporary Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, Christie's, Melbourne, 1 March 1973, lot 249, illus., as 'The Garden Path'

Private collection, Melbourne

Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne

Collection of Ted Lustig, Melbourne

Arthur Streeton, Fine Art Society's Gallery, Melbourne, 31 March - 14 April 1932, cat. 13, Toorak Garden, 100 guineas

Arthur Streeton Memorial Exhibition, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 31 March - 20 May 1945, cat. 28 as 'The Garden Path'

Norman Schureck Loan Exhibition, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, June 1958, illus. cat. 90 as 'The Artist's Garden'

Arthur Streeton, the passionate gardener, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Mornington, Vic., 9 December 2001 - 17 February 2002, cat. 17a, not in published catalogue

The Arthur Streeton Catalogue, Arthur Streeton, Melbourne, 1935, cat. 1038 as 'Toorak Gardens'

Ann Galbally, Arthur Streeton, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1969, p. 97, cat. 205

This is one of an interesting and very personal group of Streeton’s paintings – a high point in his later career – depicting his own gardens, both in Melbourne and at Olinda in the Dandenong Ranges. In 1921 he purchased a five-acre bush property, ‘Longacres’, at Olinda, built a home and studio, and progressively planted a garden there. In Melbourne, he moved in 1927 to a house named ‘Altadore’, with beautiful established grounds, at 17 Grange Road, Toorak. He bought the adjoining property, 31 Douglas Street, in 1935 purely to extend the garden.

Toorak Garden is among the artist’s largest and sunniest garden views. He loved lilies – there are photographs of him tending auratum lilies in his London garden before the First World War. Those seen here in his Melbourne garden appear to be the wonderfully fragrant summer-flowering Madonna lily, lilium candidum. He called another painting of lilies from this time ‘Madonnas in a garden’ and his large still life, Lilium auratum, 1933, is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Several of his paintings of the garden at Altadore include sunflowers, but perhaps none so splendid as those seen here, towering above the wide border of annuals and perennials in Toorak Garden. Sheltering the border on the left are a magnificent stand of mature European trees, of which Streeton was very proud and considered himself a fortunate custodian: ‘Here is an English oak, 75 years old, with a spread of 60 ft. Its myriad leaves and those of an old mulberry, two May trees, a quince, an elm, an almond and the oldest olive tree in Victoria’.¹

In one of Streeton’s articles on gardening, written for the Melbourne Argus, he declares with tongue in cheek, ‘Gardening, once it attains a firm hold on a man, enslaves him just as does alcohol or a pernicious drug’.² A letter to his old artist friend Julian Ashton, also a keen gardener but living in Sydney, takes up the same theme: ‘I am beginning to find that painting nowadays is beginning to interfere seriously with my gardening operations’.³ In fact, Streeton balanced the two passions very successfully. During the 1920s and 1930s he painted more than 150 flower paintings, and flower pieces and garden scenes dominated his exhibitions. Although they must have seemed old-fashioned to younger artists, they received acclaim from newspaper reviewers and were enormously popular with collectors. The original title of Toorak Garden, which has also been known as ‘The Artist’s Garden’ and ‘The Garden Path’, was discovered by Geoffrey Smith of the National Gallery of Victoria whilst researching the exhibition, Arthur Streeton: The Passionate Gardener with Oliver Streeton, the artist’s grandson.

We are most grateful to Oliver Streeton for assistance in cataloguing this work.

1. ‘On gardening – a reverie’, The Argus, January 1934; quoted by Oliver Streeton in Arthur Streeton: the Passionate Gardener, Mornington Peninsula Art Gallery, Mornington, 2001, pp. 16, 19. Streeton also mentions growing 'rows of Madonna lilies' in this article.

2. Ibid.

3. 4 July 1934; in Galbally, A. and Gray, A., Letters from Smike: the Letters of Arthur Streeton 1890-1945, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989, p. 203.