Conrad MARTENS
English 1801–78
worked in Australia 1835–78
Conrad Martens was born near the Tower of London and was one of three brothers who became artists. Martens adeptly practised traditional English watercolour methods and was particularly skilled in the sensitive depiction of atmospheric effects coexisting with human activity. Through his brush, the components of sky, water, mist and smoke—elements also fundamental to the work of Claude and his modern adherants, Turner and Constable—are today also laden with multiple cultural readings. In 1832–34 he replaced the ageing Augustus Earle as the ship’s artist and draughtsman on Charles Darwin’s HMS Beagle. This extrordinary opportunity provided ideas and sketches that he periodically drew upon thereafter. However, it was the following forty-three years of his life spent in New South Wales that provided most of the experiences and material for his considerable body of work in oils and watercolour; mediums in which he was equally skilled. Once in Australia, Martens worked on numerous public and private commissions, often painting estates and landholdings of newly arrived colonists rather than undertaking commercial work or solo exhibitions. Martens is said to be the only free, professional painter to settle permanently in Sydney during the first half of the nineteenth century who was able to support his family from the proceeds of his work.1
In Ford at the Wollondilly, 1839, and Aboriginal camp site, c. 1840, Martens visually reveals two stories central to the making of ‘Australia’. Aboriginal camp site, a watercolour, renders a moist, dark, cold and dense forest setting. An Aboriginal encampment with lean-to shelter is centrally depicted adjacent to a large, looming eucalypt near which indistinct Aboriginal people huddle beside two small campfires. The sky is barely perceptible amidst the dark verdure of trees; instead, mist and smoke provide a sense of ailing, oppressive confinement. Martens’s atmospheric work suggests the discomfort and unknowability of the inhabited Indigenous landscape as distinct from his depictions of the open, welcoming pastures of freshly Europeanised lands occupied by stock and stockmen under a warm golden glow of promised plenty, as evidenced by his oil painting Ford at the Wollondilly. Martens’s account book records that Ford at the Wollondilly was sold to ‘H. McArthur’ for twelve guineas on 25 June 1839. Hannibal Macarthur, one of the ‘pure merinos’ of the colony, had a station, Arthursleigh, on the Wollondilly River near Goulburn. This work depicts a darkened foreground, light-washed middle ground and framing by trees in the Claudean manner, while also evoking von Humboldt’s use of geological or botanical features as architectonic markers. Each work is bisected by an off-centre eucalypt, a device to draw the eye into and across the surface. On each side of this magnificent gum in Ford at the Wollondilly, grazing cattle and a stockman astride a horse wander affably. In this pastoral scene no sense of discomfort or anxiety underpins the subjects, unlike Aboriginal camp site produced soon after.
1 S. Jones, ‘Conrad Martens’ in The Dictionary of Australian Artists: Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engravers to 1870, ed. J. Kerr, Melbourne, 1992, p. 516.
2 ibid., p. 515.
Julie Gough
Martens was well regarded for his comprehensive and systematic practice, in 1855 providing a ‘most interesting’ lecture, according to the formerly caustic Sydney Morning Herald that in 1849 had remarked upon his unconventionality in placing his easel amid a depiction of a cavern scene as ‘a piece of childish affectation’. By 1879 he was retrospectively lauded as having ‘done so much towards illustrating the scenery of the colony’.2 Martens’s paintings provide glimpses into colonial Australian values of the early nineteenth century; however, only a handful of his works focused on Aboriginal people. According to Elizabeth Ellis, the squatters who commissioned the majority of Martens’s works ‘were only interested in what they wanted to see—the wide expanses of land of which they had taken possession’.1 And so the history of Australian land occupation over the past two hundred years is encapsulated in these two contrasting stories and resultant paintings.
1 E. Ellis, Conrad Martens—Life and Art, Sydney, 1994, p. 62.
Julie Gough