Being of “insufficient artistic merit”

A few years ago I proposed to English Heritage that they put up a Blue Plaque in Montague Square, London, to the artist, John Glover.

Born in Leicestershire in 1767, Glover was to become a successful contemporary and rival of Constable in England, noted for his romantic landscapes, before emigrating to Australia, living in Tasmania (or Van Diemen’s Land as it was then called). Extraordinarily, he was already 64 years old.

In Tasmania, he painted a great series of landscapes, one of the earliest European immigrants to tackle the bush, the “remarkable peculiarity of the trees” as he described it, and include aborigines and aboriginal life in his work.

I’ve always thought his work very special. But English Heritage did not agree, knocking back my proposal (after due consideration by their panel of “experts”) on the basis that Glover was of “insufficient artistic merit”.

I thought of this again a couple of weeks ago, seeing several of his finest canvases at the current Australia exhibition at the RA, including the magnificent “A Corroboree of Natives in Mills Plain” of 1832. In the current BBC series on Australian art, Edmund Capon announced that Glover could not have seen a corroboree as the Aboriginal population had effectively been ethnically cleansed by the settlers. Really he could not have executed this painting and others without studying the native population quite closely, and, as Ian McLean has demonstrated, he seems to have had opportunities to do this before the clearances were completed.

This sighting was followed a few days later by the sale of Glover's “Ben Lomond from Mr Talbot’s property – Four Men Catching Opossums” at Christie’s for £1.7 million.

I do hope the acquirer of that work knows that Mr Glover’s work is not worthy, at least so far as English Heritage is concerned.

Patronising Poms

I suppose that it was too much to expect.

While there have been some very positive notices about the Australia exhibition at the RA in the British press (notably in the Daily Telegraph and FT Weekend), many have struck the usual note of patronising dismissal.

For example, Adrian “I am certainly no expert on Australian art” Searle in The Guardian tells us that it’s: “… a wobbly ride through the past and into the present”, the Aboriginal paintings “extremely difficult to read”, the silverware “ghastly”, the flowering of the late nineteenth century dismissed as the work of “Barbizon-school émigrés, mediocre European impressionists and would-be symbolists”. And from then on, according to Searle, it gets “much more problematic”.  

When I went to live and work in Sydney in the 1980s, I knew all about the Aussie dislike of “whinging poms”.

But, after a while, it became clear to me that whinging isn’t the only, or even the major, source of complaint. That is the sense that Australians have of being patronised by us. Sometimes this springs from the particular style of English humour, but so often it is just naked condescension.

It had never occurred to me that this lay at the heart of Australian-English relations for generations. That is, until I picked up a book, Recollections, by the English-born writer David Christie Murray, published in 1908. Murray had lived in Melbourne in the 1890s.

“I have never in my life known anything more offensively insolent than the patronising tolerance which I have seen the travelling Cockney extend to men of the colonies, who were worth a thousand of him,” wrote Murray. “I have seen an Englishman unintentionally insult a host at his own table, and set everybody on tenterhooks by his blundering assumption that the colonists are necessarily inferior to the home-bred people. Nobody likes this sort of thing.”

You’d think we might have learned by now.