JAMES A. TURNER Australian, 1850-1908

James Alfred Turner exhibited at the Victorian Academy of Arts during the 1870s and at the Victorian Artists' Society between 1884 and 1893. Turner painted large canvases of the landscape as it changed from wilderness to cultivation, particularly favouring scenes of pioneering workers in the face of nature and taking a narrative approach to life in the bush. His art always had great popular appeal. A group of his paintings was sent to London for exhibition in 1886; several were reproduced in newspapers of the day; and William Moore, in The Story of Australian Art acknowledged that Turner should be ‘credited with depicting more phases of life on the land than most of our artists’. ¹ A Day’s Work before Them shows two generations of pioneers. Their ‘new world’ home, with its backdrop of towering gum trees, is no longer a ‘weird and melancholy’ landscape – as described by earlier settlers – but a haven full of promise for the future.

1. The Story of Australian Art, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1934, vol. I, p. 145.