John Glover

Private collection, United Kingdom
Important Australian and International Works of Art, Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 29 April 2009, lot 188 (as Artist unknown, Near Mt Wellington, Tasmania)
Masterpiece Fine Art Gallery, Hobart; purchased from the above

Framed/sealed under glass, but visible condition very good.
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Although he began his career as a landscape watercolourist and drawing master, by the time of his greatest professional success – in London around 1820 – John Glover was fully engaged with oil painting. By the time of his migration to Van Diemen's Land ten years later he had all but abandoned watercolour; a mere four confirmed autograph works in the medium have survived from his Australian years.¹  The present work is an addition to that small canon, having been  recently attributed to the artist on both historical and stylistic grounds.

The view is taken from Sandy Bay Road just south of Hobart Town, looking towards Mt Wellington and the peak of Collins' Cap. While the best arable land near the colonial capital was to the north, at New Town, the area then known as 'the Sandy Bay Farms' was well settled by the 1820s as a patchwork of small (20-100 acre) dairy and agricultural holdings – the extensive clearing and fencing and the two small farmhouses visible on the left are consistent with the likely appearance of the area at the time of Glover's residence in Hobart town in 1831-1832. Indeed, the vista is almost exactly the same as that in a work by the amateur sketcher R.E. Burnett (circa 1837, National Library of Australia).

More importantly, the work clearly displays many of the artist's characteristic watercolour mannerisms; the low light puddling in pink and gold and green on the near hills, the dappled application of the pigment in the remnant bush of the middle distance and, most tellingly of all, the extensive use of Glover's idiosyncratic 'split-brush' technique, notably in the grassy tussocks of the foreground.

While the small scale and relative lack of finish of the present work do not match those of the other known Australian watercolours, it is suggested that it may be a detached leaf from one of the artist's many sketchbooks, and that it is one of the 'nearly 300 sketches'²  which Glover claimed to have made during his first year in the colony.

1.    King Island (1831, Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery); Mount Wellington from Macquarie Street (circa 1832, Art Gallery of South Australia); and Patterdale landscape with rainbow (circa 1832, National Gallery of Australia), Patterdale, Deddington (circa 1835, Queen Victoria & Art Gallery, Launceston); see David Hansen (ed.) John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque, Hobart: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, in association with Art Exhibitions Australia, 2003, p. 205
2.  John Glover, letter to his daughter Emma Lord, 26 August 1831 – see lot 141 in this catalogue)