ARTHUR STREETON

By descent through the artist's family
Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 7 November 1984, lot 140, as 'The Garden, 31 Douglas Street, Toorak'
Christie's, Sydney, 14 August 1994, lot 88
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above

Arthur Streeton: The Passionate Gardener, Mornington Peninsula Art Gallery, 9 December 2001 - 17 February 2002, cat. 35

Geoffrey Smith and Oliver Streeton, Arthur Streeton: The Passionate Gardener (exh. cat), Morning Peninsula Art Gallery, p. 21 (illus)

Overall good original condition. Slight mark running along top edge of painting from stretcher bar. This work appears to have original stretcher and frame. The work is framed with a backing board. Fine areas of scattered re-touching across the sky.
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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, the artist purchased a five-acre bush property, 'Longacres', at Olinda, build 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, in order to extend the garden (or at least to prevent beind crowded in by speculative building).  The artist's grandson has identified the present work as a corner of the garden at Douglas Street - he particularly recalls the old wooden wheelbarrow in the picture's middle ground.

In one of Streeton's articles on gardening written for the Melbourne Argus, he declares with tongue in cheek: 'Gardening is the very devil.  It should be studiously avoided by those who delight in an easy seat and a cigar, and by those who wear high-heeled shoes and whose geranium-coloured lips are the reward of patient brushwork.  Gardening, once it attains a firm hold on a man, enslaves him just as does alcohol or a pernicious drug...'¹  The same year he famously if facetiously wrote to Julian Ashton: 'I suppose we are the only two Australian Artist's who actually do gardening work - and I am beginning to find that painting nowadays is beginning to interfere seriously with my gardening operations...'²

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 thtye must have seemed old-fashioned to younger artists, the received acclaim from newspaper reviewers and were enormously popular with collectors.  More recently, a survey exhibition of his garden views and floral still lifes was as warmly received: Arthur Streeton: The Passionate Gardener was curated by Geoffrey Smith and Oliver Streeton fort he Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery in 2001.

Garden Green is a fine example of Streeton in 'passionate gardener' mode.  It is lush, almost English in its colour, with the foliage of trees and bushes flickering in high-key touches of oil.  At the right is a rich weighting of colour in the form of a thickly flowering lilac.  The treatment overall is broad and confident 0 in front of the labouring still-life of wheel-barrow and rakes, the garden path seems almost hastily brushed in - as if the artist were in a hurry to get back to some real work in the garden.  Appropriately, this work was included in Streeton's 1940 Variations exhibition, a show which he dedicated to Alister Clark (1864 - 1949) the celebrated rose breeder whose more than 120 new varieties included 'Lorraine Lee' and 'Black Boy'.

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

1.  Arthur Streeton, 'On gardening - a reverie', The Argus, January 1934, quoted in Geoffrey Smith and Oliver Streeton, Arthur Streeton: The Passionate Gardener, (exh. cat.), Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, 2001, p. 16
2.  Arthur Streeton, letter Julian Ashton, 4 July 1934 quoted ibid p. 12