Barry Humphries: in praise of Australian art

In my career as a music hall artiste I travel the world, mostly in the Dominions, the United States and the cleaner countries of Europe. Aside from giving incalculable pleasure to thousands of people, I love, on my days off, to visit picture galleries: usually the porticoed kind, in search of those overlooked little masterpieces that lurk, not seldom, in provincial museums. Today, most art galleries have a shop selling postcards of paintings from other museums, Magritte oven mitts and Piero della Francesca fridge magnets. They sell books as well, sometimes useless coffee table tomes like Art Deco Cufflinks Down the Centuries and London Transport Textiles and Their Creators.  However, it was in Toronto that I first came upon Tom Thomson, a ‘Canadian master’ of whom I had never heard. There were simply huge monographs devoted to his paintings of lakes, mountain peaks and snow-decked conifers, executed in a creamy Brangwynesque impasto. He, and several other artists like him, are all world famous in Toronto.

It’s the same with Australia, which has produced, in its short history, a host of fine artists, some fetching a fortune in local auctions but totally unknown and unregarded abroad. The forthcoming exhibition of Australian art at the Royal Academy, the first major show since Bryan Robertson’s Recent Australian Painting at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1961, will probably be an eye-opener to its visitors, and I am proud to say that most of it stands up very well against the competition. We have our own Tom Thomsons, of course, and excellent they are, but our Impressionist school, well represented in this show, will be a revelation. At the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th, there were groups of regional painters practising their own brand of Impressionism in many countries, including Denmark (Skagen), Cornwall (Newlyn), Hungary and America, but especially the artists of the so-called Heidelberg School, named after a picturesque village outside Melbourne, where Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and Charles Conder painted their early masterpieces.