ARTHUR STREETON’S HISTORIC PAINTING SETTLER’S CAMP TO BE AUCTIONED
ARTHUR STREETON
(1867 - 1943)
SETTLER’S CAMP, 1888
oil on canvas
86.5 x 112.5 cm
Estimate: $1,000,000 – 1,500,000
Arthur Streeton's historic painting Settler's Camp is to be auctioned at Deutscher and Hackett's Important Fine Art Auction in Sydney on 2 May, 2012.
A critical work in the development of Australian Impressionism, Arthur Streeton’s Settler’s Camp was painted in 1888, the year of Australia’s centenary, at the fabled Box Hill artist’s camp established by Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin in 1885. It is historically important in terms of art history and indeed the development of Australian national identity. As James Smith, the art critic for The Argus wrote when it was first exhibited at the inaugural exhibition of the newly formed Victorian Artist’s Society in 1888, “Mr. Arthur Streeton’s “Settler’s Camp”...is a poetical interpretation of a prosaic passage in the daily life of one of the pioneers of agricultural settlement. A free selector, who has pitched his tent on the outskirts of the forest...has just lit the fire for his evening meal, and through a narrow vista the light of the departing day looks in and almost transfigures the homely surroundings of the lonely and self-reliant man.”
The themes of pioneering the bush and making one’s way to prosperity in the new colony were popular in Australian art around the time of the Centenary. Frederick McCubbin’s Down on His Luck (1889) in the Art Gallery of Western Australia and The Pioneers (1901) and Tom Roberts’ Shearing the Rams (1890), both in the National Gallery of Victoria all embody the same ethos of the industrious bushman taming the land in the face of great hardship.
These themes still powerfully resonate today. When Settler’s Camp was first sold at public auction to Robert Holmes à Court in 1985 it fetched $800,000, an all time record price for any Australian painting at auction. A key work in the exhibition Golden Summers – Heidelberg and Beyond, in 1985 the painting has remained in private hands since that exhibition and was repatriated to Australia this year from the United States of America where it is currently owned by an Australian family.
UPDATE: ARTHUR STREETON, SETTLER’S CAMP, sold for $2,520,000 (inc. BP), an auction record for the artist