CONRAD MARTENS 1801-1878

Oil on canvas
Signed and dated 1843 lower right; bears artist's name on stretcher on the reverse

RELATED WORK
From Douglass's Farm, Currajong, July 19/38 Morning looking East, pencil drawing, State Library of New South Wales, ML, PXC 295, f.74
PROVENANCE
Kenneth R. Stuart Collection, Sydney, until April 1979 Consolidated Press Holdings, The H. W. B. Chester Memorial Collection The Dallhold Collection Fine Australian Paintings and Books, Sotheby's, Melbourne, 23 August 1992, lot 268 as 'Mt Tomah, Blue Mountains'
Private collection, Sydney
EXHIBITED
Conrad Martens Centenary Exhibition, S. H. Ervin Museum and Art Gallery, Sydney, 24 May - 23 July 1978, cat. 47 Bush Trails and Squatters' Runs, New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale, 1986, cat 14 Conrad Martens: The H. W. B. Chester Memorial Collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 22 December 1979 - 10 February 1980, cat. 13
REFERENCE
Possibly in Martens's Account Book as 'View from the Currajong, W[illiam] Carter', 30 December 1842 Douglas Dundas, The Art of Conrad Martens, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1979, pp. 25, 45, illus. Barry Pearce (ed.), Conrad Martens: The H. W. B. Chester Collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1979, cat. 13, illus. The Australian Women's Weekly, 29 November 1979, illus. p. 37 Diana de Bussy, The Alan Bond Collection of Australian Art, Dallhold Investments, Perth, 1990, p. 45 Elizabeth Ellis, Conrad Martens, Life & Art, State Library of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 1994, p. 92

Having visited the Blue Mountains in May 1838, Conrad Martens returned later that same year and on 19 July completed the pencil drawing titled 'From Douglass's Farm, Currajong, Morning looking East', on which the present oil painting is based. Douglass was Henry Grattan Douglass; and 'Currajong', now spelled Kurrajong, is on Bell's Line of Road, past Windsor and Richmond, on the way to Lithgow. Martens also stayed with George Bowen at 'Bowen Mount' near Mount Tomah. This July-August expedition was one of his most valuable in terms of future subject matter. He travelled through the Hawkesbury Valley to Windsor and Richmond, Kurrajong, the Macdonald River and Wiseman's Ferry. 'For the rest of his life Martens used sketches and drawings from these journeys for finished watercolours and oils'.(1) By 1843, when he completed Currajong - Morning, looking East in his Sydney studio, Martens was established as the leading painter in the colony.' Trained in England by the fashionable watercolourist Copley Fielding, Martens had set sail in 1832 for three years in India. However in 1833 he left that first ship in South America and there joined the Beagle, travelling with the young Charles Darwin and Captain Robert FitzRoy. During that voyage, until October 1834, Martens learned all he could about botany, geology and meteorology - the latter a relatively new science and a special interest of FitzRoy - and these studies transformed his vision of land, sea and sky. Martens arrived in Sydney in 1835 and remained there for the next forty-three years - the rest of his life. Currajong - Morning, looking East is one of his most romantic views of the Australian landscape. The sun-dappled foreground is all virgin rainforest, with towering eucalypts, ancient tree ferns and hanging vines. A pair of weary travellers take a rest in cool shade, looking out over the expansive valley beyond; and a brightly-coloured parrot leads the eye into azure distance. Martens's great gift was his ability to incorporate minutely observed effects of nature into compositions which embodied all the precepts of landscape art as he - and his patrons - understood it. Here he presents the picturesque topography of the 'new world', ripe for exploration and eventual settlement: thus the massive fallen tree in the right foreground may well signify the past, soon to