Хайдельбергская школа: Австралийский импрессионизм XIX века.

19th century Australian art movement

The Heidelberg School was an Australian art movement of the late 19th century. It has been described as Australian impressionism. Melbourne art critic Sidney Dickinson coined the term in an 1891 review of works by Arthur Streeton and Walter Withers, two local artists who painted en plein air in Heidelberg on the city's rural outskirts. The term has since evolved to cover these and other painters—most notably Tom Roberts, Charles Conder and Frederick McCubbin—who worked together at "artists' camps" around Melbourne and Sydney in the 1880s and 1890s. Drawing on naturalist and impressionist ideas, they sought to capture Australian life, the bush, and the harsh sunlight that typifies the country. The movement emerged at a time of strong nationalist sentiment in the Australian colonies, then on the cusp of federating. The artists' paintings, like the bush poems of the contemporaneous Bulletin School, were celebrated for being distinctly Australian in character, and by the early 20th century, critics had come to identify the movement as the beginning of an Australian tradition in Western art. Many of their major works can be seen in Australia's public galleries, including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The name refers to the then rural area of Heidelberg, east of Melbourne, where practitioners of the style found their subject matter, though usage expanded to cover other Australian artists working in similar areas. The core group painted together at "artists' camps", the first being the Box Hill artists' camp, established in 1885 by Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Louis Abrahams. They were later joined by Arthur Streeton, Walter Withers, and Charles Conder. See below for a list of other associated artists.

In August 1889, several artists of the Heidelberg School staged their first independent exhibition at Buxton's Rooms, Swanston Street, opposite the Melbourne Town Hall. Named the 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition, it included 183 "impressions", of which 63 were by Tom Roberts, 40 by Arthur Streeton and 46 by Charles Conder. Smaller contributions came from Frederick McCubbin and Charles Douglas Richardson, who, in addition to 19 oil paintings, included five sculpted impressions in wax and bronze. The majority of the works date from the autumn and winter of 1889 and were painted on wooden cigar box lids, most measuring 9 by 5 inches (23 × 13 cm), hence the name of the exhibition. Louis Abrahams, a member of the Box Hill artists' camp, sourced the lids from his cigar business, Sniders & Abrahams. In order to emphasise the small size of the paintings, the artists displayed them in broad kauri pine frames, many asymmetrical in design and left unornamented, others painted in metallic colours or decorated with verse and small sketches, giving the works an "unconventional, avant garde look". The Japonist décor they chose for Buxton's Rooms featured Japanese screens, silk draperies, umbrellas, and vases with flowers that perfumed the gallery, while background music was performed on certain afternoons. The harmony and "total effect" of the display showed the marked influence of Whistler and the broader aesthetic movement. In his seminal history of Australian art, published in 1934, William Moore referred to the Heidelberg School as "the golden age of landscape painting in Australia". By this time, the movement's pastoral vision had come to dominate Australia's leading art institutions, which continued to shun the modernist innovations of more recent Australian artists, such as Clarice Beckett, Roy De Maistre and Grace Cossington Smith. Even until the early 1940s, winning entries of the prestigious Wynne Prize, awarded annually by the Art Gallery of New South Wales for "the best landscape painting of Australian scenery", "invariably depicted the gum trees, sunlight and rural scene as developed by Streeton and Roberts". Heidelberg School member Walter Withers won the inaugural Wynne Prize in 1897 with The Storm, and leading successors of the movement, Elioth Gruner and Hans Heysen, went on to win a record seven and nine times, respectively. According to Robert Hughes, the Heidelberg School tradition "ossified" during this period into a rigid academic system and an unimaginative national style prolonged by what he called its "zombie acolytes". The federation of Australia in 1901, followed by World War I and the Great Depression, are seen to have contributed to the enduring popularity of their work. In the 1920s and 30s in particular, it offered comfort to Australians still reeling from the war, as it depicted a "pastoral utopia" that was "eminently worth defending even unto death". Writing in 1980, Australian artist and scholar Ian Burn described the Heidelberg School as "mediating the relation to the bush of most people growing up in Australia. Perhaps no other local imagery is so much a part of an Australian consciousness and ideological make up." Their works are known to many Australians through reproductions, appearing in bars and motels, on stamps and as the covers of paperback copies of colonial literature. Heidelberg School artworks are among the most collectible in Australian art; in 1995, the National Gallery of Australia acquired Streeton's Golden Summer, Eaglemont (1889) from a private owner for $3.5 million, then a record price for an Australian painting. McCubbin's Bush Idyll (1893) briefly held the record price for a publicly auctioned Australian painting when it sold at Christie's in 1998 for $2.31 million. Many period films of the Australian New Wave drew upon the visual style and subject matter of the Heidelberg School. For Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), director Peter Weir studied the Heidelberg School as a basis for art direction, lighting, and composition. Sunday Too Far Away (1975), set on an outback sheep station, pays homage to Roberts' shearing works, to the extent that Shearing the Rams is recreated within the film. When shooting the landscape in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), cinematographer Ian Baker tried to "make every shot a Tom Roberts". The Getting of Wisdom (1977) and My Brilliant Career (1979) each found inspiration in the Heidelberg School; The movement is explored in One Summer Again, a three part docudrama that first aired on ABC television in 1985. The series' depiction of the landscape was described by one critic as having "the soft warmth of a McCubbin painting". The movement featured in the Australian citizenship test, overseen by former prime minister John Howard in 2007. Such references to history were removed the following year, instead focusing on "the commitments in the pledge rather than being a general knowledge quiz about Australia." The Heidelberg School has been surveyed in major exhibitions, including the nationwide blockbuster Golden Summers: Heidelberg and Beyond (1986), and Australian Impressionism (2007), held at the National Gallery of Victoria. Inspired by their acquisition of Streeton's 1890 painting Blue Pacific, the National Gallery in London hosted an exhibition titled Australia's Impressionists between December 2016 and March 2017, focusing on works by Streeton, Roberts, Conder and John Russell, an Australian impressionist based in Europe. In 2021, from April to August, the National Gallery of Victoria hosted the exhibition She Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism.

The notion that the Heidelberg School painters were the first to objectively capture Australia's "scrubby bush" gained widespread acceptance in the early 20th century, but has since been disputed; for example, in the 1960s art historian Bernard Smith identified "an authentic bush atmosphere" in John Lewin's landscapes of the 1810s, and John Glover in the 1830s is seen to have faithfully rendered Australia's unique light and sprawling, untidy gum trees. Another longstanding assumption has been that the Heidelberg School was groundbreaking in its choice of local themes and subjects, creating a nationalistic iconography centered on shearers, drovers, swagmen, and other rural figures. Such images had already become entrenched in Australian popular culture through the black and white art of The Bulletin and other illustrated periodicals. The pictorial tradition of the bushman can be traced back to S. T. Gill and other artists of the 1850s gold rushes, and reached its apotheosis with The Picturesque Atlas of Australasia (1886–88).