Arthur Streeton

In the summer of 1889, during a drought, Arthur Streeton set up in an old farmhouse at Eaglemont on the edge of Melbourne and painted the dry, golden hills running out toward the blue Dandenong Ranges. Golden Summer, Eaglemont became one of the best-loved Australian landscapes, and in 1892 it was the first painting by an Australian-born artist hung at the Royal Academy in London.

Streeton was one of a group of young painters who worked outdoors together at bush camps near Melbourne with Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin, later called the Heidelberg School after one of their camping spots. They were trying to catch the real light and heat of the Australian country rather than paint it in the soft tones of Europe, and Streeton had a particular gift for the high, bleached blue of a hot local sky.

He spent years in London chasing recognition, then came home a celebrated figure and painted the Western Front as an official war artist in 1918. Knighted in 1937, Streeton died in 1943 at Olinda, up in the Dandenong Ranges, the same blue hills he had painted from a distance at Eaglemont half a century before.