Lot 22: KNUD GEELMUYDEN BULL (1811-1889)

View of Hobart Town signed and dated 'K Bull 1853' (lower right); with three labels attached (to the reverse) oil on canvas 35 x 48.5 cm PROVENANCE John Roberts The Reverend R.J. Roberts By descent to Robert Halliley Australian Art Auctions, Sydney, cat.no.16, 10 September 1979, item 175 Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne EXHIBITION Melbourne, Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition of Australia, 1866 Melbourne, Deutscher Fine Art, Australian Colonial Art, 28 April - 23 May 1980, cat.no.23 NOTES Hobart Town, 1853, shows the settlement looking north up the Derwent River valley from south of Mount Nelson. What was once a beautifully sited convict colony has become a city of some size with numerous buildings, including many churches. Although these are not depicted in sufficient detail to distinguish individual buildings, they help to identify the city as a civilised outpost of the Empire. Mount Direction, on the eastern shore, rises as the most prominent hill, and in the far distance the highlands of central Tasmania lie along the horizon. The foreground bush, featuring eucalypts, casuarinas and dense undergrowth alludes to the infancy of the settlement. But the central foreground pasture, and the dead tree, a victim of land clearance, indicate that European settlers have already made their mark on what once was a landscape of a different kind. The road which meanders through the foreground adds to this sense of the settlement's potential expansion as well as suggesting a peaceful and benign landscape without the terrors of wilderness or aggressive native inhabitants who had, by this time, been largely exterminated Between 1853 and 1856 Knud Bull painted several views of the developing colonial settlement of Hobart Town. The most well-known of these, City of Hobart Town and Hobart Town and Mount Nelson, both circa 1854, are in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart. However, Bull painted at least two other versions, of which Hobart Town, 1853 might be the first of what was to become his most popular subject. Knud Bull had arrived in Norfolk Island from London in 1846, convicted of assisting in a forgery. The son of a pharmacist, he had studied art in Sweden and Germany. The influence of the northern Biedermeier painters is obvious in his carefully detailed portraits and landscapes. On board ship and in Australia, his good conduct earned his licence to paint, and assigned to the Rev. J.G. Medland, an amateur landscape painter, in 1851 Bull began to paint Tasmanian landscapes. The Tasmanian landscapes, especially the views of Hobart, became Bull's signature works. Highly detailed, they possess a romantic quality. The small, but prosperous settlement of Hobart and the houses of his clients, nestle in a benign, but mysterious, landscape. The sublime qualities of the landscape are highlighted by the contrast between the sunlit settlement with the darkness of the bush. Wide, sometimes lurid, sunset skies, potently remind the viewer that there are forces greater than man. We are grateful to John McPhee for providing this catalouge entry.