From the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut.
Landscape painting reached its zenith in Australia and the United States in the nineteenth century. This book examines the differences in the art of two nations with ancient indigenous populations that were later settled by British colonists.
Some 50 major paintings from each country reveal the transformation of old world European conventions to produce landscapes of "new worlds", themselves and at the same time reveal how nineteenth-century Australian and Americans saw themselves in relation to nature. Here art is seen in a larger context - as a meeting ground between two parallel traditions; and the paintings of both traditions offer cues for the rethinking of their counterparts.
This book coincides with the first exhibition to compare the images and the development and achievement of Australian and American landscape paintings. It explores their thematic and stylistic parallels, their shared expressive concerns as well as their divergent social and political origins.
