ALBERT HENRY FULLWOOD

Private collection, Sydney

A Very Private Collection, S.H. Ervin Gallery, National Trust Centre, Sydney, 15 June - 15 July 1990, cat. 14

Heavy gold ornate Victorian frame. fine areas of cracking through the sky. Would benefit from a light clean.
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Although British born and trained, A. H. Fullwood was a significant figure in the formation of an Australian national school of landscape painting in the late nineteenth century. A black and white artist for the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia and an illustrator for The Bulletin, he also painted around Sydney Harbour, up the Hawkesbury River and in the Yarra Valley, often in company with Julian Ashton, Charles Conder, Tom Roberts and/or Arthur Streeton. He was one of the founders of the New South Wales Society of Artists, and as a teacher had a significant influence on Tasmanian art in the 1890s.

Returning to England in 1900, Fullwood continued to work, exhibit and publish as an illustrator, painter and printmaker. He maintained his Australian connections through friendship with expatriates such as Roberts, Streeton, George Coates and James Quinn, and showed with the Society of Australian Artists at the Royal Academy.

On the outbreak of World War I, Fullwood was too old for active duty but served as one of the Chelsea Arts Club volunteer orderlies at Wandsworth Hospital. However, when the Australian War Memorial (War Records Section) began its art program in early 1918, Fullwood was commissioned Honorary Lieutenant and visited the Western Front on two occasions: with the 5^th Division on the Somme from May to July, and then around Ypres after the Armistice, in December.

This work was painted on the first of these tours of duty, in the summer of 1918. It shows a high, grassy escarpment sweeping into the middle distance, topped by a dark olive silhouetted ridge of trees and with thickly impasted chalky outcrops and roads in the river valley below. The verdigris-blonde grass, the cobalt stream and the mauve-blue cloud shadow make the work curiously reminiscent of Fullwood's Australian landscapes. Indeed, the artist himself was later to write: 'It is a strange thing, but all that country along the Somme reminded me very much of Australia in its colo[u]ring and often when I have been looking down upon some sunny valley I have been struck by the resemblance to the scenes I had painted near Heidelberg in the old days.'¹

This particular sunny valley is just outside the village of Daours, near Amiens, looking eastward towards Corbie - identifiable by the twin towers of its abbey church. The mood of the picture is predominantly one of calm and clarity, but there are hints of martial darkness. On the road below are two cavalrymen and a row of military vehicles, the seated soldier is accompanied by an army nurse in uniform and may in fact be maimed, while blood-red poppies dot the foreground grasses. Just over the horizon to the south are the frontline trenches where the Australian Corps had halted the German army's final 'Michael' offensive at Villers-Bretonneux just a few months previously.

This broad, bright landscape is one of the artist's most impressive World War I paintings. It is in all likelihood identical with The Somme Valley Near Corbie, which was included in the National Gallery of Victoria's A. H. Fullwood Memorial Exhibition of 1945 (cat. 13).

1. A. H. Fullwood, 'The Gazelle Girl. Artist Discovers Type. 'New Art' Attacked', The Herald, Melbourne, 18 September 1920