Stop and Look -John Glover: A Corroboree of Natives near Mills’ Plains
Glover is a shining example to the rapidly expanding population of older people in Britain today. He was born in the English Midlands in the middle of the eighteenth century and practised as a landscape painter, working somewhat conventionally in a vaguely classical idiom. He evolved a distinctive mannerism for painting foliage in watercolour, which he passed on to his many pupils and exhibited his oil paintings at the Royal Academy. A picture of his won a medal at the Paris Salon in 1814, a year in which he also spent some time in Italy.
Then, in 1830, he and wife followed three of their sons to Tasmania, where they settled on a farm in the middle of the island. At the age of sixty-four Glover set up his easel once more and became the founder of the Australian school of landscape painting.
His rebirth in the Antipodes was remarkable. Rather than continuing to paint nicely balanced Claudean compositions, he reinvented himself as a vividly sensitive portrayer of the scenery of Tasmania – which could not have been more different from England’s. He saw that the ubiquitous gumtrees grow quite differently from English oaks and elms, he observed that the colour of the rocks, of the soil, is different. He painted the Aboriginal Australians with an absorbed interest in their way of life, their customs and ceremonies. He was able to send several of these glimpses of an unfamiliar world home to the Royal Academy in London. Glover died at the age of eighty-two and is buried under a large and simple slab in the centre of Tasmania.
He and his family brought to Australia an English love of gardening, which manifests itself in his charming picture of the Glovers’ home, which they had built themselves. An unpretentious, comfortable-looking Georgian house like many others in the island, it was surrounded by abundant cultivation: tree-ferns, shrubs and flowers of many kinds, all thriving under the hot Tasmanian sun. A model of industrious immigration and adjustment to a new environment. Glover’s fertile adaptation of his life and art at such a late phase of his career could surely be an inspiration to many of us.
