Natives at a corroboryc 1835

John Glover was a celebrated colonial landscape artist who left England for Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) at the age of 63. He has been dubbed the ‘father of Australian landscape painting’ and his works depicting the native bushland of Tasmania remain among his most celebrated and exhibited.

In this landscape Glover avoids the darker (and more common) English country-garden aesthetic, imbuing the shores of the Jordan River with a remarkable sense of lightness and beauty. Glover’s visual treatment of Aboriginal people is also notable for the joy and humanity he evokes, despite the solemn fact that this work was created years after the cultural activities it depicts had been brutally silenced.