Add These 18 Paintings as Must-Sees During Your Next Trip to Australia

Scotsman Thomas Watling was the first professional artist to arrive in New South Wales, Australia, and this is the earliest known oil painting of Sydney. However, Watling was not a willing traveler—he was convicted of forging banknotes in his native town of Dumfries and sentenced to 14 years in the recently established penal colony in Botany Bay. He arrived at Port Jackson in 1792 and became well known for his prolific sketches of birds, fish, mammals, plant life, and Aboriginal peoples; many of his sketches are now in the British Museum. His topographical studies, like this detailed picture of Sydney Cove, depict the flora and fauna surrounding the fledgling colony, although the Italianate composition perhaps softens the reality of what was a rough, isolated prison settlement that housed some 2,000 convicts. The identity of the actual creator of this painting has been debated: the canvas is dated 1794 on the reverse, and there is no record of any colonial artist using oils until 1812—over a decade after Watling received a full pardon and returned to Scotland. But the painting carries the inscription “Painted immediately from nature by T. Watling.” It is likely that it was based on one of his drawings but created by an artist in England. Regardless of its origins, this painting is an important expression of Australia’s colonial origins. It is part of the collection of the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney. (Ossian Ward)

Arthur Boyd was one of Australia’s best-loved artists, but he hated to be described as such, preferring instead “painter” or “tradesman.” Born in Murrumbeena, Victoria, Boyd grew up in an artistic family. However, his parents’ marriage was troubled and his father faced financial ruin after his studio burned down. Boyd lived and traveled with his grandfather, the artist Arthur Merric Boyd, who nurtured his grandson’s talent. Confronted by brutality and racism in World War II, Boyd produced a series of Expressionist works featuring maimed soldiers and the dispossessed. Back in his homeland, Boyd was distressed to discover how badly Aboriginal peoples were treated; he highlighted their experiences in several paintings known as the Sir Edward Burne-Jones Bride series. In the late 1950s, Boyd moved to London, England, where he created his celebrated Nebuchadnezzar series as a response to the Vietnam War. In the last 25 years of his life, Boyd and his wife divided their time between Italy, England, and Australia. In the early 1970s, Boyd created a series of paintings featuring figures languishing in the Australian landscape. This painting shows a naked artist being held up by his back legs, clutching paintbrushes in one hand and a pile of gold in the other. The artist later explained, “You really don’t want to hang on to possessions. You want to hang on to concepts. Concepts involve the future whereas possessions don’t.” Boyd donated more than 3,000 of his paintings, drawings, and other work to the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, where this painting can be found. (Aruna Vasudevan)

Australian landscape painting surged in the 1850s, as the gold rush attracted European artists to Australia. Austrian-born painter Eugène von Guérard arrived in Australia in 1852, shortly after the death of British-born John Glover, widely considered the father of Australian landscape painting. Like Glover, von Guérard had been greatly impressed by the works of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, but he had become a devotee of high German Romanticism, exemplified by Caspar David Friedrich. By 1863, von Guérard had become the foremost landscape painter in the colonies. Typically Romantic, he depicts this mountain view as an untouched wilderness, a theme commonly favored by painters wishing to rebel against 19th-century urbanization. A cluster of figures in the foreground appears small and insignificant against the awesome backdrop, while careful contrasts of light and shade emphasize the sublime drama of nature. They also hint at von Guérard’s earlier association with a group of German artists called the Nazarenes, keen proponents of medieval draftsmanship who believed that nature could bring man closer to God. From 1870, von Guérard spent 11 years teaching at the School of Painting in the National Gallery of Victoria before migrating to England. Von Guérard’s art and writings have a special historical significance today, documenting the way in which gold mining and urbanization transformed the Australian landscape. This painting is in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. (Susan Flockhart)

Born in Scotland, Ian Fairweather began to draw in earnest while he was a prisoner of war in World War I. During that time he also taught himself Chinese and became interested in East Asian life. In the 1930s he began working with Australian artists, eventually settling in the country after years of traveling around China, Bali, and other countries in Asia. He spent many years living as a recluse on Bribie Island, north of Brisbane. His interest in calligraphy and the Chinese written language informed his art, and he moved from producing tonal figures to a more linear style and restrained use of color. In the 1950s, Fairweather began to produce larger works, and he moved from using thick gouache on poor materials to synthetic polymer paint, often mixed with gouache. At the end of the 1950s Fairweather sent 36 abstract paintings to the Macquarie Gallery, and they were very well received. These pieces led to Monastery, which won the John McCaughey Prize; and Epiphany, which Fairweather often said was his best work, painted the following year. Many consider Monastery, which is held by the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, to be a masterpiece. It shows Cubist influences and reveals Fairweather’s interest in calligraphy. At the time, the Australian artist James Gleeson said that Monastery was “an extraordinary, fascinating hybrid from the pictorial traditions of Europe and the calligraphy of China.” Monastery helped cement Fairweather’s reputation as one of Australia’s greatest artists. (Aruna Vasudevan)

Born in Cody, Wyoming, the youngest of five sons, Jackson Pollock’s childhood was disrupted by the family’s constant moving in search of work. His youth was spent in search of an artistic vocation that he found increasingly illusive and frustrating. Plagued by insecurities, his moods swung from wild, alcohol-fueled, and attention-seeking to shy, inarticulate, and desperate. His first solo show was in 1943. His marriage to the artist Lee Krasner in 1945, and their move to a house in the countryside, prompted a new type of painting—his so-called “drip paintings.” These paintings made Pollock’s name, and the commercial value of his paintings rose. However, as the first drip paintings were shown at the Betty Parsons Gallery, postwar euphoria was replaced by the emerging specter of the Cold War. With this new mood came a resistance to what was perceived as European-inflected Modernism, and voices in U.S. Congress claimed there was a link between abstraction and communism. Pollock’s technique was ridiculed by Time magazine, which named him “Jack the Dripper.” His desire for a greater financial return on his work led him to change dealers, and in 1952 he moved to the nearby Sidney Janis Gallery. The major new work on exhibition was Blue Poles [Number 11, 1952]. This marked a new intensity in Pollock’s painting with its range of marks, drips, pours, and splodges of paint in enamel, aluminum paint, and glass. The colors also broke free from Pollock’s previously restrained palette. This is a painting that is celebratory in its excess. It can be found in Canberra in the National Gallery of Australia. (Roger Wilson)

As well as being a curator and deputy director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales for 16 years, Tony Tuckson was a prolific artist, producing more than 400 canvases and more than 10,000 drawings. Despite this, he held his first exhibition in 1970, just three years before his death. Over the course of his artistic career, Tuckson became increasingly interested in, and influenced by, Abstract Expressionism. White over Red on Blue is one of the artist’s later paintings, and this large canvas seems a roughly produced work. Tuckson applies layers of synthetic polymer paint on composition board, building up layer upon layer of blue and reddish-brown pigment (reminiscent of the Australian earth), before slapping broad strokes of white paint across and down his canvas. The dripping of the white paint down the canvas is in keeping with Abstract Expressionistic style, but overall Tuckson’s work is more controlled and contained in this painting than in some earlier works. The viewer is confronted with the rough texture of the paint in White over Red on Blue, the immediate contrast between dark and light on the canvas, and also the sheer impressive size of the painting. Tuckson helped to bring Aboriginal and Melanesian art into major art collections in Australia. He also collected Aboriginal grave posts, which were often painted in clay and ocher. Some argue that White over Red on Blue, which is in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, is reminiscent of these posts and draws on Aboriginal culture. (Aruna Vasudevan)

Although the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was short-lived, bursting onto the art scene in 1848 and disbanding by 1853, its ideals were more enduring, influencing British art for the rest of the century. Edward Burne-Jones belonged to the second wave of Pre-Raphaelites, making his mark in the 1870s. He studied for a time under Dante Gabriel Rossetti, sharing his passion for early Italian art, which is clearly evident in The Garden of Pan. Burne-Jones visited Italy in 1871 and returned full of new ideas for paintings. One of these was to be “a picture of the beginning of the world, with Pan and Echo and sylvan gods…and a wild background of woods, mountains and rivers.” He soon realized this scheme was too ambitious and painted only the garden. The mood and style of this work is reminiscent of two early Italian masters, Piero di Cosimo and Dosso Dossi. Burne-Jones may have seen their work on his travels, but it is more likely he was influenced by the examples owned by one of his patrons, William Graham. As was his custom, Burne-Jones put a new slant on the classical legends. Normally, Pan is shown with goatlike features, but Burne-Jones presents him as a callow youth (his own name for the picture was “The Youth of Pan”). The setting is Arcadia, a pastoral paradise that serves as a pagan equivalent of the Garden of Eden. Burne-Jones admitted that the composition was slightly absurd, declaring that it was “meant to be a little foolish and to delight in foolishness…a reaction from the dazzle of London wit and wisdom.” The Garden of Pan is in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. (Iain Zaczek)

In 1770 the explorer and naval captain James Cook stepped onto the beach at Botany Bay—an event that led to the founding of a new colony and, eventually, the birth of a nation. Parts of Australia had been mapped by previous explorers, but Cook discovered an excellent spot for settlement. More than a century later, Emmanuel Phillips Fox commemorated this moment. The work was commissioned to mark another significant moment in Australian history—the six colonies became a commonwealth and had their own parliament on January 1, 1901. Fox was a natural choice for the job. He was probably the most eminent native-born Australian artist at the turn of the 20th century, recognized in Europe as well as at home for his vigorous brushwork and subtle use of color. He had already founded an art school in Melbourne and been elected an associate of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris, as well as exhibiting regularly at London’s Royal Academy. 

The subject matter of Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770 is in the heroic mold, recalling French 19th-century historical painting. One of Fox’s teachers had been Jean-Léon Gérôme, who was well known for this style of work. In the painting, Cook’s party plants the British Red Ensign, claiming the territory for Great Britain. Some of his men also train their guns on two Aboriginal people in the painting’s background; these Aboriginal people are depicted as threatening Cook’s party, which vastly outnumbers them. The painting’s action is ambiguous—is Cook gesturing to stop his men from firing?—but the violent consequences of the arrival of the Europeans is rendered clearly. As of 2020, this painting was no longer on display at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. (Christina Rodenbeck and the Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Francis Bacon’s raw, unnerving, and arousing images prod his viewers’ emotions, forcing them to question how their ideas about life, desire, and death correspond with his. Bacon’s life comprised a series of abusive and abused lovers, drug and drinking binges, and professional successes. Study from the Human Body (in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) exemplifies the aesthetic and psychological concerns that dominate his entire body of work. His paint is as slippery as a secretion and soaks into his canvases like a stain. His composition blends the key figure into his environment, and his rendering of the form establishes a foreboding sense of psychological or even physical sadism. Barred from the viewer by a curtain created from the same tones as his flesh, the figure appears decorative and objectified as the object of Bacon’s erotic interest. (Ana Finel Honigman)

Fred Williams started his art education in 1943 at the National Gallery School in Melbourne. During the 1950s he traveled to England, where he stayed for five years to study at both Chelsea and the Central Schools of Art. After his clearly academic start in Australia, his English experience opened his eyes to modern art, particularly Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. From the time he was in London, Williams’s practice as an etcher influenced his development as a painter and resulted in a cross-fertilization of ideas between the two techniques. With hindsight it seems highly probable that this interplay between painting and printmaking is at least partly responsible for the shift he finally made from his early rather European-looking work to the groundbreaking approach we see in Drifting Smoke, which is in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Back in Australia during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Williams created work that continued to show a strong European influence, his paintings being usually of the figure and clearly influenced by Amedeo Modigliani. During the 1960s, however, Williams managed to shake off the weight of history and found a way of describing the Australian landscape that was both original and persuasive. In Drifting Smoke, a field of hot, dusty earth pictured after a bush fire is first dotted with small sharply focused objects, then introduced to the sky by wisps of drifting smoke. Made at a time when cutting-edge artists were weighing abstraction against figuration, this painting sits neatly between what at that time seemed to be the two poles of painting. (Stephen Farthing)

While stylistically Nicolas Poussin’s early work is recognizable through the influence of Raphael and classical statuary, and was often based upon a literary theme, the latter canvases realized by the artist derive from biblical narratives. Originally The Crossing of the Red Sea was conceived along with The Adoration of the Golden Calf as constituting a complementary pair. (Both were first recorded as being in the collection of Amadeo dal Pozzo, the cousin of Cassiano dal Pozzo, who later became the artist’s most important patron.) In The Crossing of the Red Sea, various figures are seen emerging from the water that, having parted, allows the “children of Israel” to cross the Red Sea. Compositionally, this is perhaps one of Poussin’s most ambitious canvases, and it demonstrates his skill in organizing what is, in effect, a tumultuous scene. The energy and heightened sense of drama of the work is primarily carried through the expression of the various figures that occupy the foreground of the frame. Unlike Poussin’s earlier compositions, which conveyed a sense of tranquillity, and often only depicted a lone figure almost dwarfed by the pastoral landscape they inhabited, The Crossing of the Red Sea relinquishes such luxury in favor of dramatic gravitas. Utilizing almost every square inch of canvas in order to convey the moment when the Red Sea parted, the strained, almost contorted poses some of the figures adopt, along with the gesturing of Moses toward the heavens, forcefully conveys the magnitude and dramatic sweep of the event as it unfolds. The Crossing of the Red Sea is in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. (Craig Staff)

Narrative painting comes into its own with Rembrandt van Rijn, who excels at conveying a moment in an ongoing sequence of events. This painting is also a gripping study of old age, a subject that Rembrandt returned to in his later self-portraits. It has been known by different titles over the years, but one more-than-plausible interpretation is that the subjects of the narrative are the apostles Peter and Paul; they are disputing a point in the Bible, which may have a specific theological significance in the context of Protestantism in the Netherlands at that time. The light strikes Paul’s face as he points at a page in the Bible, while the obdurate Peter is in darkness. Seated like a rock, as Jesus had described him (“Thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church”; Matthew 16:18) he listens attentively to Paul. But his fingers mark a page in the huge Bible on his lap, suggesting that he has another point to make as soon as Paul stops speaking. The contrasting light in this painting reveals the Dutch master at his most Caravaggesque. Rembrandt uses it not only to delineate form but also to suggest the character of each man. Paul, in the light of reason, is learned and rational. (Rembrandt identified with Paul so closely that, in 1661, he painted himself as the saint.) Peter, in the shadow, bullish and headstrong, thinks intuitively. Two Old Men Disputing is in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. (Wendy Osgerby)

Clifford Tjapaltjarri grew up around Jay Creek in the Northern Territory, Australia. He was influenced by the art teacher Geoffrey Bardon, who came to Papunya in the early 1970s to encourage Aboriginal artists. Until then, the Aboriginal people had drawn their “dreamtime stories” in the sand, and Bardon wanted them to commit them to canvas. Bardon provided the acrylic paint and canvases and left his students to express their cultural and personal visions. Afterward, a new movement emerged known as Western Desert Art, and Tjapaltjarri became one of its leading exponents. His paintings fetch large sums at auction and are held in many major collections in the world. Typical of Tjapaltjarri’s style, Men’s Dreaming, 1990 is composed of a series of precise dots of paint; the figures of the Dreaming are arranged symmetrically over a maplike design. This painting had been shown in the Aranda Art Gallery in Melbourne. (Terry Sanderson)

Grace Cossington Smith became one of Australia’s leading artists during the early 20th century. Credited as the first Post-Impressionist work by an Australian artist, this painting has an oblique link to the horrors of World War I, despite the fact that it portrays a domestic interior thousands of miles from the front. The model was the artist’s sister, depicted in the act of knitting socks for soldiers in the European trenches. The painting’s structure is based on single brushstrokes of vivid color built up into blocks that lend the composition its form—in this, Smith was following the European Post-Impressionists. But in her bold use of color and the elongation of her lines, she evolved a distinct and individual style that became a rallying cry for Australian Modernists. The bright foreground and prominent shadows are a hallmark of her landscape paintings in particular. The Sock Knitter is in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. (Dan Dunlavey)

Aboriginal artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye painted her first acrylic on canvas when she was in her 70s, and she soon became one of Australia’s great modern painters. She is thought to have been born in 1910 and had already spent a lifetime making art and batik cloth for ceremonial and everyday purposes, especially for awelye—female-only Aboriginal rituals—to which the subtitle of this triptych also refers. The striped designs traditionally painted on the breasts and necklines of women during ritual ceremonies inspired many of Kngwarreye’s paintings, which also respond to the land and spiritual forces through the interplay of lines, dots, and colors. The earthy hues of this austere, late monochrome work recall the rock formations and red earth of her ancestral home in Alhalkere on a stretch of Aboriginal desert land known as Utopia, northeast of Alice Springs. The white lines may also represent tracks in the physical sense as well as in the metaphorical sense of being tracks through time and history. Before her artistic career, Kngwarreye formed the Utopia Women’s Batik Group in 1978 and exhibited her silk designs across the country. She began painting prolifically in 1988, producing around 3,000 works on silk, cotton, and canvas in just eight years, the proceeds of which went back into her community. Surprisingly for an indigenous artist, she quickly gained mainstream acceptance in Australia, even representing the nation at the Venice Biennale, albeit a year after her death, in 1997. Untitled (Awelye) is in Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. (Ossian Ward)

Gordon Bennett was born in Monto, Queensland, Australia in 1955. He left school at 15, taking on a variety of jobs until, in 1998, he graduated in Fine Arts at the Queensland College of Art. He quickly established himself as an artist addressing the themes of identity and alternative histories. His interest in this area was sparked by the discovery, at the age of 11, that he had Aboriginal ancestry. According to Bennett, his work is an expression of the 18 years it took to come to terms with his own “socialization.” Much of his work is concerned with casual racism in white-dominated Australia, asserting a personal liberation from racial labels and stereotypes. Myth of the Western Man (White Man’s Burden) uses a figure of an Australian pioneer clinging to a collapsing pole or mast. The figure’s left leg disappears into a flurry of white dots, possibly indicating how cultural identity can become blurred over the passage of time. There are patches of blue among the white dots, with stenciled dates important in Aboriginal history. The use of small dots evokes pointillism, but it also reflects the technique used in desert painting for disguising secret knowledge. His melding of styles and referencing of iconic Western imagery challenges the viewer to assess their view of colonial and Aboriginal history. Myth of the Western Man (White Man’s Burden) is in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. (Terry Sanderson)

Established English landscape artist John Glover was in his 60s when, in 1831, he arrived in Tasmania. His romantic, Claudean landscapes had received much acclaim in Britain, yet he chose to turn his back on the English scenes that had brought him success and embrace the challenge of a new and strange environment. Glover’s new setting, combined with his ability to accurately record his subject, allowed the artist to work with new and excited eyes and freed him from his former precise approach. The sheer scale of the terrain (which dwarfed the tight vistas of his native country), the grayish greens of the landscape, and the bright Australian sunlight entered Glover’s paintings as he skillfully recorded “the remarkable peculiarity of the trees” and the sublime beauty of the horizon. The effect of A View of the Artist’s House and Garden in Mills Plains, Van Diemen’s Land verges on the surreal. The artist contrasts a pastoral scene of a home and newly planted garden, populated with neat rows of English flowers, against the open, unknown landscape beyond. The subject reflects the artist’s experience of using his English sensibilities to carve out a home and create a personal Eden in the context of a foreign and seemingly uncharted setting. Not only did Glover find a new personal aesthetic, he created a visual language for describing his new environment. Known for creating some of the most significant paintings to come out of the Australian terrain, he is considered “the father of Australian landscape painting.” A View of the Artist’s House and Garden in Mills Plains, Van Diemen’s Land is in the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide. (Jessica Bishop)

Born in Dorchester, England, Tom Roberts emigrated with his widowed mother to Australia in 1869, where they settled in a suburb of Melbourne. He became a photographer’s assistant, a job he kept for 10 years, while studying art at night under Louis Buvelot. Roberts became the first major Australian painter to study at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, which he did for three years from 1881. He also studied Impressionism in Europe, returning to Australia in 1885 and dedicating himself to painting the light and color of the bush. Roberts became foundation president of the Society of Artists in 1895 and was one of the first to paint outback subjects; Shearing the Rams and A Break Away! are among his best known works. Many of his contemporaries considered the life of ordinary Australians an unfit subject for “fine” art, but his studies of life in the bush were to become his most enduring creations, loved by subsequent generations of Australians for their dignified and affectionate depiction of working people. A Break Away! certainly earns the exclamation mark of the title, showing a tumultuous chase as a drover charges headlong down a steep slope after an escaped sheep. The rising dust, the panic-stricken animals, and the barking dog all give the impression of a bit of welcome action in an otherwise uneventful day. Whether it was sheepshearing, wood splitting, or droving, Roberts’s paintings are heartfelt, exhilarating works that capture the spirit of 19th-century working Australians. A Break Away! is in the the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide. (Terry Sanderson)