John GLOVER

English 1767–1849
worked in Australia 1831–49

In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke distinguishes two fundamental impulses: ‘the Passions belonging to Self-preservation, and those which regard the Society of the Sexes’, and he compares these to two differing sets of environmental stimuli. On the one hand there is the sublime, the ‘Salvatorial’ mountain landscape, a realm of terror, obscurity, vastness, magnificence and suddenness. On the other there is the more Claudean, more pastoral, more feminine beautiful, characterised by smallness, smoothness, gradual variation and delicacy.1

John Glover, ‘the English Claude,’ emigrated to Van Diemen’s Land at the age of sixty-three, simultaneously starting a new life on the land and taking up the challenge of depicting the Australian landscape. His vision of the latter has proven to be the most distinctive of the early colonial period.

Alongside his local scenes, Glover found there was a ready market in Van Diemen’s Land for European views. These were either copies of views he had painted in Britain before emigrating, or were worked up from his British sketchbooks. A mountain torrent, c. 1837, is thought to be a replica of one of the Welsh or Lakes District views he exhibited in the 1820s. The Claudean devices of framing trees, darkened foreground and light-flooded middle ground are dispensed with here as Glover zooms in on the flank of a mountain, confronting us with a densely wooded rock wall. It is an unusual composition for him and shows the influence of another of his seventeenth-century heroes, Salvator Rosa. The extremes of light and dark, and the motif of the man and dog crossing the torrent, add drama to the scene.

1 D. Hansen, John Glover and the Tasmanian Picturesque (exh. cat.), Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, & Art Exhibitions Australia, Sydney, 2003, p. 26.

Terence Lane