Été doré, Eaglemont

Arthur Streeton was 21 and painting out in the open on a hillside at Eaglemont, on the edge of Melbourne, where he and other young artists had set up a summer camp. The summer of 1889 was one of drought, and rather than fight it he made the dryness his subject, spreading a warm gold of parched grass under a pale sky and, far off, the blue line of the Dandenong hills. He was reaching, on purpose, for his most ambitious picture yet, and it carried. The following year it travelled to London, and in 1891 it hung at the Royal Academy, the first painting by an Australian-born artist shown there, before later drawing an honourable mention at the Paris Salon. This blue and gold he came to call nature's scheme of colour in Australia.