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.
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