John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque

John Glover (1767-1849) was arguably the most important landscape painter working outside Europe in the 1830s and is widely recognised as the finest Australian landscape painter of the early colonial period.

The exhibition John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque contains more than 100 works – paintings, watercolours, drawings, prints and sketchbooks – borrowed from 15 museums, galleries, and libraries and from 13 private and corporate collections in Australia, the UK and the US.

Glover’s Australian paintings are also important historical documents. They present images of an unspoiled Tasmanian bush, of traditional Tasmanian Indigenous culture and of the life of the settlers of the 1830s. 

In addition to Glover’s paintings of colonial life in Australia, the exhibition includes works produced during his successful forty-year career in Britain prior to his emigration. The inclusion of these works contextualises his later work and shows how he constructed his vision of a new land in terms of contemporary taste and of the traditions of European art.