Deutscher and Hackett

Painter and printmaker, Henry Burn is one of the key figures in early Melbourne art history. While documentary records of his life are sparse, he is known to have made more than half a dozen lithographs; was a regular participant in local art exhibitions (at the Victorian Society of Fine Arts and later, the Victorian Academy of Arts); and enjoyed the patronage of the flamboyant doctor and politician, Dr Louis Smith.1 Having published numerous views of English country towns in the 1840s before his emigration to Victoria, Burn turned this experience to his account in paintings and prints of post-gold rush Melbourne and its environs. His landscapes are of immense historical significance as ‘a faithful record of the place’2 from the 1850s to the 1870s. They also have a particular idiosyncratic charm, with their urban-topographical realism enveloped within a pastoral-recreational dream. As the art historian Patricia Reynolds has observed, ‘many of Burn’s luminous landscapes have a light and airy quality which seems out of his generation.’3

Not surprisingly, the La Trobe Library at the State Library of Victoria holds the most extensive public collection of Burn’s paintings, drawings and prints – among which is an 1868 watercolour, South Yarra Hill, which features an almost identical view, taken from the north bank of the Yarra at a point opposite the Botanic Gardens, looking eastwards upriver.

1. Reynolds, P., ‘A Note on Henry Burn’, La Trobe Journal, no. 11, April 1973, pp. 49 – 59
2. Henry Burn, letter to HE The Lieutenant-Governor of Victoria, Sir J. Henry T. Manners-Sutton, 30 April 1867, Victorian State Archives
3. Reynolds, P., ‘Burn, Henry’ in Kerr, J. (ed.), The Dictionary of Australian Artists: Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engravers to 1870, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992, p. 116