ABRAHAM-LOUIS BUVELOT

Charles Bennett, Melbourne; thence by descent
Private collection, Tasmania 

Jocelyn Gray, Louis Buvelot: His Life and Work, cat. 71, illus. 240, Vol. 2 II, MA thesis, University of Melbourne, 1977

Good condition. Retouching to tree centre right, to cow bottom centre and small areas to left and right of the left hand tree.
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Near Bacchus Marsh, Sunset Over the Werribee is a highly characteristic example of Abraham-Louis Buvelot's Australian landscape painting, offering a tranquil transcript of nature in which the civilising hand of man is present, and cows graze contentedly while the day lengthens peacefully into twilight. The area is fenced, cool waters flow nearby, while nature herself cradles the scene in her enfolding hills. Buvelot was the master of such scenes, all enveloped in a luminous atmosphere with the bush bathed in gentle sunlight. These were the images that appealed so greatly to the youthful Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts, who so admired his work that they acknowledged him as 'the "father" of landscape painting in Australia.'¹ He was the most admired painter of his day, his death in 1888 being commemorated by a large retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria where, in 1894, the Grosvenor Gallery was renamed the Buvelot Gallery in his honour. Even his memorial at the Kew Cemetery was erected through public subscription.

In March 1876 Buvelot was on one of his sketching tours in the Bacchus Marsh region, midway between Melbourne and the gold-rich town of Ballarat. A number of drawings in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery bare evidence of his activities - there are two dated pencil drawings of the Lerderderg Creek at Bacchus Marsh in the Melbourne collection, and Ballarat has Bacchus Marsh, Goodmans Creek, 1876. Significantly, the 1876 drawing of Bacchus Marsh in the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum came from the sale of Charles Bennett's collection. Of others related works, the watercolour, Cattle Grazing Beside a River is a direct study for the oil painting, Goodman's Creek Bacchus Marsh in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Both are inscribed '1876'. The area appealed to Buvelot, and apparently his clients, for he returned to the subject again, probably working from existing sketches for his oil, Werribee Creek at Bacchus Marsh of 1878, again at Ballarat, and the sepia wash, Bacchus Marsh of 1881, in the Bendigo Art Gallery. The latter is related to one of the Lerderderg drawings in Melbourne.

The provenance of the painting links it to Charles Bennett of the firm of Huxley and Parker, monumental masons in Melbourne.
An amateur painter and a friend of the artist, Bennett was one of Buvelot's early champions - the Bendigo Art Gallery's famous Buvelot holdings include  numerous works from this source.   

1. William Moore,The Story of Australian Art, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1938, vol. I, p. 87