John Glover 19th-C painting which returned to Australian ownership last year has been completely restored and will now go on display alternately in Canberra and Hobart

See below for details of Glover and his work prepared by our arts editor Anisimova

The 1830s John Glover colonial painting "Mount Wellington and Hobart town from Kangaroo Point" was purchased by the pooled resources of the National Gallery of Australia and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery for $1.7million late last year (2001) and the display of the work will be shared between Tasmania and Canberra.

At the time of the auction, art dealers and art investors argued whether or not the price was too low, but the painting's value as a piece of art and a piece of art history is undisputed. Glover sent the picture to England where it was exhibited in 1836, and it has taken almost 170 years to get it back into Australian exhibition.

The picture, which has been completely restored at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, shows Mount Wellington in the background, with the settlement of Hobart in the foothills, with Aborigines swimming in the Derwent River in the foreground.

John Glover (1767-1849) - Colonial landscape artist

Sometimes we mistakenly judge the art of the past in terms of today's hard-nosed pragmatism, expecting the value of a painting to lie in the accuracy of its representation. What use has it otherwise? Only for a brief period in the mid-nineteenth century, however, did Western taste seek pictorial naturalism, and then, of course, photography came along to satisfy that need. For the rest, paintings have always served to transcend plain materiality.

Landscape, which once served as the inanimate background to narrative, religious, allegorical and portrait paintings, came into its own in the seventeenth century. Nature no longer played a supporting role in visual representation, but became a star player in its own right. The painted landscape now reflected human emotions, expressed national aspirations, and symbolised life's spiritual aspects. Just as an allegorical figure was never painted warts and all, neither was the landscape -- it was always represented in an idealised way.

A cliché that still retains some currency is that the first white artists looked at the Australian landscape with English eyes. Of course, this is an attempt to explain away the apparent lack of realism in their depictions of colonial vegetation, especially the gum trees. But these artists -- with the exception, perhaps, of the most straightforward topographers -- were not attempting to make an exact copy of the actual landscape. Rather, they were creating their own ideal landscape by applying formulaic conventions to the existing one.

The English-born landscape painter, John Glover (1767-1849), fits perfectly into this discussion. Working first in watercolours and then in oils, Glover faithfully followed the landscape tradition practised by the seventeenth-century French artist, Claude Lorrain. Defined within its frame, a Claudean landscape was a reflection of the past, an illusory world into which the viewer was inexorably drawn. Glover, like many of his fellow artists working in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, echoed Claude's trademarks -- especially the nostalgic golden glow bathing the landscape. When Glover arrived in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) in 1831 on his 64th birthday, he brought this Claudean repertoire with him. He also brought commissions for paintings, which would have been a snack for him, had he stuck rigidly to the Claudean template. But, anxious to accommodate the novelty of his new surroundings into conventional landscape painting, Glover found himself in a dilemma. Should he continue his tried and true methods or try something new? Or, as he seems to have decided, attempt a pictorial compromise?

How well Glover succeeded can be judged from his Mount Wellington and Hobart town from Kangaroo Point, which he sent back to London to be exhibited in New Bond Street in 1835. In later oil paintings such as The Bath of Diana (1837, National Gallery of Australia) or The Last Muster of the Tasmanian Aborigines at Risdon (1836, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston), Glover disturbed his characteristic Claudean tranquillity with sinuous and near-anthropomorphic gum trees, with diminutive Aboriginal figures happily gathered beneath them, and nary a white person in evidence. What Glover presented in these paintings was his idealised vision of the past, harking back to the serenity of the landscape before the invasive arrival of white settlers. In Mount Wellington and Hobart town from Kangaroo Point, however, Glover depicts the white settlement of Hobart Town, with a group of Aborigines swimming in the Derwent River. Glover never witnessed a scene such as this. By the time he arrived in the colony, only remnants of the indigenous Tasmanian population remained. It was his fancy that the indigenous people and the European usurpers could happily coexist in this way. Perhaps what Glover painted was his vision of what might have been.