JANE SUTHERLAND

Anne & Douglas Cairns by 1977; thence by descent
Private collection, Melbourne

Winter Exhibition, Victorian Artists Society, Melbourne, 20 April 1893, cat. no. 15
Victorian Artists Society Exhibition of Australian Art, Past and Present, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 10 August 1893, cat. no. 15
Sutherland, Victorian College of the Arts Gallery, Melbourne, 8 - 30 September 1977, cat. no. 10
Australian Impressionism, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 31 March - 8 July 2007, cat. no. 12.5

Frances Lindsay and Stuart Rosewarne, Sutherland (exhibition catalogue), Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, 1977, cat. no. 10
Frances Lindsay, 'Jane Sutherland: thoroughly Australian Landscapes', in Terence Lane (ed.), Australian Impressionism (exh. cat.), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, pp. 224 - 237, illus. p. 236

Good condition. UV inspection reveals minor areas of retouching particularly on left rebate.
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The gifted daughter of a cultured Scottish immigrant family, Jane Sutherland was a notable presence in Melbourne cultural circles during the 1880s and 1890s.  A student at the National Gallery School, a contemporary and colleague of Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, E. Phillips Fox and Walter Withers, she painted en plein air at various locations around Melbourne air with these leaders of Australian Impressionism, most notably at the Box Hill camp in 1888. She also maintained a painting and teaching studio (with Roberts, Clara Southern and others) at the fashionably Aesthetic Grosvenor Chambers, in Collins Street.  A regular exhibitor with the Victorian Academy of Arts and then the Victorian Artists Society, Sutherland enjoyed wide critical acclaim during 1890s, The Age describing her as 'the leader amongst the lady artists of Victoria, of the open air school.^'1

Unfairly neglected for much of the twentieth-century, Jane Sutherland's reputation was rehabilitated by feminist art historians from the mid-1970s and her significant place in Australian naturalist painting restored.²  She was the only female artist to feature in the National Gallery of Victoria's recent exhibition Australian Impressionism, with an impressive array of thirteen works. 

The present work was one of those included in the NGV exhibition, and its blurred, elegiac mood is typical of the artist's style.  As early as 1888 The Argus had noted a certain 'clever vagueness' in her work, a 'general indistinctiveness of all the objects in the landscape.'³  Here, however,  the misty, drizzling wetness of the atmosphere employs this deliberate McCubbinesque softening to describe meteorological reality.  Like First Green After the Drought (1892, Newcastle Region Art Museum), the present work documents and celebrates the end of a long and disabling dry period in the Australian colonies.  The colour of the landscape is also distinctive; Sutherland was an enthusiastic convert to the new chemical mauve and purple 'art-tints', with their 'noticeably feminine aesthetic.'⁴  Frances Lindsay notes that After Autumn Rains in particular 'revels in the use of a palette of mixed blues, burnt earth pigments, madder and violet, also evident in The Mushroom Gatherers (1895, National Gallery of Victoria) and Field Naturalists (circa 1896, National Gallery of Victoria)'.⁵ 

Sutherland's paintings are rare - the present work is the first landscape in oil to come onto the market in more than twenty years.  This tender, 'Whistlerian' impression is a significant offering, a substantial work by one of the most important Australian women artists of the 19th century.

1. The Age, 19 May 1894, p. 14
2. See Frances Lindsay and Stuart Rosewarne, Sutherland (exh. cat.), Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, 1977; Janine Burke, Australian Women Artists 1840 - 1940, Greenhouse Publications, Melbourne, 1980; Victoria Hammond and Juliet Peers, Completing the Picture: Women Artists and the the Heidelberg Era, Artmores, Melbourne 1992
3. The Argus, 16 November 1888, p. 4
4. Michael Varcoe-Cocks, quoted in Frances Lindsay, 'Jane Sutherland: thoroughly Australian Landscapes', in Terence Lane (ed.), Australian Impressionism (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, p. 228
5. ibid.