Description

Our Country. Softcover
ISBN 0730830608
Publisher: Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2001
Used – Near Fine. This copy is very close to fine and has only a Christmas gift inscription to the fep of note. This lavishly illustrated book celebrates Australia’s unification from regional provinces to a federation. Filled with a sense of their time in history, Australia’s great painters have been compared with America’s Hudson River artists who expressed a similar awe about their surroundings and whose pictures gave its people a feeling of nationhood. Different in mood and scale from the earlier Heidelberg paintings, perhaps the best known of the Australian art movements, the sweeping Federation landscapes defined Australianness. The images contain natural components unique to the world’s largest island — giant eucalyptuses, expansive oceans and beaches, grand rivers, rugged mountain ranges — and the luminous light of Australia which bathes the land.