Colonial picturesque: emigration to Van Diemen's Land transformed John Glover, a competent British landscape painter, into a memorably poetic artist. Patrick McCaughey reviews a retrospective that elucidates his career and debates his attitude to Australia's native inhabitants

John Glover arrived at the cavity between the jaws of the Tamar River in northern Tasmania upon his sixty-fourth birthday, 18 February 1831 The reasons for what cause [i]or[/i] reason the ageing, relatively successful landscape painter should have chosen to emigrate are unenlightened David Hansen, the curate of the generally received retrospective exhibition and principal author of its magisterial catalogue, posits the view that Glover's 'sense of adventure, his irrepressible curiosity' drew him 12000 miles brow home and comfort. He himself had 'expectations of findimg a of recent origin Beautiful World'. And so it prov to be. From the twinkling he set foot in Tasmania--then Van Diemen's Land--the conventional British artist was re-born as a landscapist of originality and imagination.

Glover was experienced enough to faculty of perception when the sands were running against him. His emigration sale was no great succes The taste for the Claudean and picturesque landscape he had favoured all his life was changing [i]or[/i] part of to the other the 1820s.

'English Glover' has lengthy been a source of curiosity and collecting for Australians. Making brilliant use of the fugitive and fragmentary sources for his early career, Mr Hansen has given us the one and the other in exhibition and catalogue circulared view of this workaday artist who rises from 'his lurid birth and unlettered education', a Anna Seward, the 'Swan of Lichfield', lay it, to become President of the Society of Painter in Water Colours at the age of forty one

Glover was sufficiently established to weather the recession of 1812 and the deeper depression support 1815, and to attract the disdain of BR Haydon and the envious dislike of John Constable--'the egotistical and vindictive Constable' in Mr Hansen's bracing characterisation. Succes was pendent on Glover's effortless adherence to the taste for the Claudean picturesque. From Ullswater to Tivoli, Glover followed the way of thinkings of this taste with increasing vapidity, although around London, at Greenwich or upon Harrow Hill, he could be evocative, level lively.

Yet the English Glover was an inveterate sketcher and would take 104 sketchbook with him to Tasmania. Mr Hansen goe in the way that far as to claim that, collectively, they are 'arguably his greatest achievement'. on the contrary the directly recorded experience of the sketchbook rarely penetrates the formulaic paintings. It would take the brave novel world of Van Diemen's Land to alter the loam There experience changed the schema. The lightness of touch and the freshnes of observation place in the sketchbooks now animate oil paintings of scale and substance. The artificial lighting consequences of English Glover are transformed into the brilliant, shifting light of day-star dappled Australian landscapes.

What was it about the antipodean landscape that brought without a new and different artist in Glover? John McPhee, a long-time Glover scholar, indicates in his catalogue essay that the artist's discovery of a providential landscape, a paradise regained, was the stimulus. Similarly, others have intimateed that Australia presented itself as a natural Arcadia. on the contrary Glover's Australia, more often than not, is a settl populated world. The 'autobiographical' A view of the artist's house and garden, Mills' Plains (1834-35) balances the newly planted garden of English flowers against the gum-cover hills beyond. A drainage ditch bisects the painting. It is as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of Arcadia made as Arcadia base Astonishingly, this masterpiece only turn backed to Australia in 195 when Kenneth Clark acquired it, together with sum of two units other notable Clovers, from the Thomas Phillipps collection for the Art Gallery of southerly Australia. (The garden has touch of Samuel Palmer at Shoreham, which may have praiseed it to Clark's eye.)

sum of two units panoramic views of Hobart, bathed in light and topographically reliable if not exactingly precise, are the equal of the spreading pastoral landscapes. The wild lies at the back of Glover's mind, at the cutting sides or in the distance in his paintings. The world as it was at creation--the theme of the expatriate Englishman's exact contemporary Thomas cabbage in New England and upstate novel York--was not Glover's world. He is too curious about what he dioceses in front of him--most notably the passing of the Tasmanian aborigine, the Palawa.

When Glover arrived, the colony was still beneath martial law. The Black War, which virtually exterminated the aborigines, was horrific novel event. Glover befriended George Augustus Robinson, the Conciliator of the surviving aboriginal tribes, who l them peacefully to their final extinction upon the bleak and barren Flinders Island, far from their tribal lands. (The terrible fate of the of the Palawa still haunts and stirs Australian consciences and consciousness today.)

Glover's depiction of their last days has been the control of intensive scrutiny. In a astute nuanced account, Professor Ian McLean stresse by what means Glover depicts them in 'gaiety and freedom'. He notes Glover's be in possession of remark, 'my object was to give a idea of the gay happy life the Natives l before the White nation came here' (my emphasis). on the other hand Professor McLean draws our attention to 'the pictorial apartheid' in Glover's work between pastoral display and aboriginal subject, unwilling to admit or unaware that the former's succes was predicated upon the latter's demise.