Go back in time with early Brisbane watercolours

Robert S. Rayment, England/Australia 1839-93 / Farm landscape with colonial homestead (detail) 1888 / Watercolour over pencil on wove paper on cardboard / 38.5 x 101.2cm / Acc. 1:0116 / Purchased 1911 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art

Robert S. Rayment, England/Australia 1839-93 / Farm landscape with colonial homestead (detail) 1888 / Watercolour over pencil on wove paper on cardboard / 38.5 x 101.2cm / Acc. 1:0116 / Purchased 1911 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / View full image

Together with drawing, watercolour was most often the medium of choice for documenting the early years of settlement in Queensland, especially to depict the landscape, chosen for its ability to record fine detail, evoking atmosphere, and most favoured for its portability and convenience.

In this watercolour Farm landscape with colonial homestead 1888 Robert S (Saunder) Rayment (1839-93) captures an ordered and productive English-inspired Queensland landscape hewed from the surrounding bush thought to be in the area around Brookfield or Pullenvale, now rural residential sister suburbs 12km south-west of Brisbane. The work features the rolling hills of the area, however by the 1850s early loggers sought the rich timber reserves and the land was then subdivided and auctioned in the 1860s when early settlers moved in to farm a variety of fruit and crops, with dairying beginning in the 1880s. This enduring watercolour is now a rare record of a mid-nineteenth century Brisbane pastoral scene.

Robert S Rayment ‘Farm landscape with colonial homestead’

Robert S. Rayment, England/Australia 1839-93 / Farm landscape with colonial homestead 1888 / Watercolour over pencil on wove paper on cardboard / 38.5 x 101.2cm / Acc. 1:0116 / Purchased 1911 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art

Robert S. Rayment, England/Australia 1839-93 / Farm landscape with colonial homestead 1888 / Watercolour over pencil on wove paper on cardboard / 38.5 x 101.2cm / Acc. 1:0116 / Purchased 1911 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / View full image

‘Fairview’ (built in 1875) at Brookfield

James Brimblecombe’s residence ‘Fairview’ (built in 1875) at Brookfield, Brisbane / 39243 / Courtesy: State Library of Queensland, Brisbane

James Brimblecombe’s residence ‘Fairview’ (built in 1875) at Brookfield, Brisbane / 39243 / Courtesy: State Library of Queensland, Brisbane / View full image

Farm workers at Pullenvale

Farm workers at Pullenvale, 1889 / 41551 / Courtesy: State Library of Queensland, Brisbane

Farm workers at Pullenvale, 1889 / 41551 / Courtesy: State Library of Queensland, Brisbane / View full image

Robert S. Rayment, England/Australia 1839-93 / Farm landscape with colonial homestead (detail) 1888 / Watercolour over pencil on wove paper on cardboard / 38.5 x 101.2cm / Acc. 1:0116 / Purchased 1911 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art

Robert S. Rayment, England/Australia 1839-93 / Farm landscape with colonial homestead (detail) 1888 / Watercolour over pencil on wove paper on cardboard / 38.5 x 101.2cm / Acc. 1:0116 / Purchased 1911 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / View full image

Robert S (Saunder) Rayment

Born in London, from an early age, Rayment showed a talent for painting, but in deference to his parents’ wishes, he studied law, and after obtaining his qualifications, he returned to his first interest — art. He was once a pupil of the influential English art critic and watercolourist John Ruskin (1819-1900), but little is known of his artistic career before he migrated to Australia with his family in 1887 and settled in Brisbane July of that year.

Rayment was determined to contribute to this new society, only a month after his arrival, he exhibited watercolours of local subjects at the Queensland National Agricultural and Industrial Association. The following year, among others, he also provided paintings for the Queensland Court at the Centennial International Exhibition, Melbourne in 1888. Rayment’s first two years in Queensland were spent travelling and painting clients properties. He painted numerous locations on the Brisbane River, as well as bush scenes in and around Brisbane, however his active career in Brisbane lasted just six years and very few of the artist’s works survive.

Robert S Rayment ‘Stanthorpe’

Robert S. Rayment, England/Australia 1839-93 / Stanthorpe 1888 / Watercolour / Collection: State Library of Queensland, Brisbane

Robert S. Rayment, England/Australia 1839-93 / Stanthorpe 1888 / Watercolour / Collection: State Library of Queensland, Brisbane / View full image

Robert S Rayment ‘Humpybong (Redcliffe)’

Robert S. Rayment, England/Australia 1839-93 / Tippers 1889 / Watercolour over pencil / 37 x 33cm / 66351 / Collection: State Library of Queensland, Brisbane

Robert S. Rayment, England/Australia 1839-93 / Tippers 1889 / Watercolour over pencil / 37 x 33cm / 66351 / Collection: State Library of Queensland, Brisbane / View full image

Robert S Rayment ‘Mount Coot-tha’

Robert S. Rayment, England/Australia 1839-93 / Mount Coot-tha c.1892 / Watercolour and gouache over pencil on wove paper / 34.8 x 24.4cm / Acc. 1:0115 / Gift of Miss E. Rayment 1911 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art

Robert S. Rayment, England/Australia 1839-93 / Mount Coot-tha c.1892 / Watercolour and gouache over pencil on wove paper / 34.8 x 24.4cm / Acc. 1:0115 / Gift of Miss E. Rayment 1911 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / View full image

The beginning of Brisbane’s art and culture

Rayment exhibited his watercolours at the Royal Queensland Art Society, of which he was a member, and taught drawing at the Brisbane Technical College, and Brisbane Girls’ Grammar School. In 1890, he applied for a position vacated by JA Clarke (1840–90) as Head of the Art Branch at the Brisbane Technical College which was eventually awarded to R Godfrey Rivers (1858-1925).

Rayment’s contemporary, JA Clarke is best remembered as a pioneer art teacher. In 1869–74 he was the only drawing teacher in Queensland Government schools and in 1881 he initiated art classes at the Brisbane School of Arts, and it was largely due to Clarke that the School of Arts classes became a Technical College in 1884.

Joseph Augustine Clarke ‘Panorama of Brisbane’

Joseph Augustus Clarke, Australia 1840–1890 / Panorama of Brisbane 1880 / Oil on canvas / 137 x 366cm / Collection: Queensland Museum

Joseph Augustus Clarke, Australia 1840–1890 / Panorama of Brisbane 1880 / Oil on canvas / 137 x 366cm / Collection: Queensland Museum / View full image

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, as the infrastructure of the Colony of Queensland improved and Brisbane began to acquire facilities usually found in much larger cities, formal institutions for teaching and education were established, and watercolour was an ideal medium to teach for its versatility. The Brisbane School of Arts opened, the Royal Queensland Art Society opened in 1887 as a result of the efforts of local artists Isaac Walter Jenner (1836-1902), Oscar Friström (1856-1918) and L.W.K. Wirth (1858 –1950), and the Queensland National Art Gallery (now QAGOMA) opened its doors in temporary premises in the old Town Hall on Queen Street in 1895, following advocacy by Jenner and Rivers.

Queensland (National) Art Gallery opened in 1895

Old Brisbane Town Hall building, c.1870 / 179307 / Courtesy: State Library of Queensland, Brisbane

Old Brisbane Town Hall building, c.1870 / 179307 / Courtesy: State Library of Queensland, Brisbane / View full image

Isaac Walter Jenner ‘Brisbane’

Isaac Walter Jenner, England/Australia 1836-1902 / Brisbane from Bowen Terrace, New Farm 1888 / Oil on board / 14.5 x 21.8cm / Acc. 1995.076 / Purchased 1995. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art

Isaac Walter Jenner, England/Australia 1836-1902 / Brisbane from Bowen Terrace, New Farm 1888 / Oil on board / 14.5 x 21.8cm / Acc. 1995.076 / Purchased 1995. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / View full image

R Godfrey Rivers ‘Under the jacaranda’

R. Godfrey Rivers, England/Australia 1858-1925 / Under the jacaranda 1903 / Oil on canvas / 143.4 x 107.2 cm / Purchased 1903 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art

R. Godfrey Rivers, England/Australia 1858-1925 / Under the jacaranda 1903 / Oil on canvas / 143.4 x 107.2 cm / Purchased 1903 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / View full image

Curatorial extracts, research and supplementary material compiled by Elliott Murray, Senior Digital Marketing Officer, QAGOMA

Related Stories

  •
    Read •

    A tale of two blooms

    During springtime, Brisbane is awash with colour — the lavender of the jacaranda mix with an array of red and yellow flowers. Spring is also when you can see the vermilion blooms of the Butea at its peak, due to its fiery appearance, it’s given the name ‘Flame of the Forest’. R (Richard) Godfrey Rivers (1858-1925) painted the Butea blooms in An alien in Australia in 1904 (illustrated) for the Queensland Art Society’s annual exhibition. It’s easy to imagine that Rivers felt encouraged to produce a grand study of this exotic species after the enthusiastic response to his painting Under the jacaranda 1903 (illustrated) exhibited the previous year. RELATED: Under the jacaranda R. Godfrey Rivers ‘An alien in Australia’ The work An alien in Australia depicts the introduced ‘Flame of the Forest’ tree (Butea monosperma, formally known as Butea frondosa), the species native to tropical and sub-tropical parts of the Indian subcontinent and South-East Asia. The tree Rivers painted was planted in Brisbane’s Botanical Gardens (illustrated) by Gardens Superintendent Walter Hill (1819-1904) in the 1860s. Brisbane Botanical Gardens at the time As part of the classifying fervour that dominated botanical science in Europe, and to exploit the new ranges of plant material that were being discovered in the far corners of the world, in 1855 the Queensland Botanic Gardens were established at Gardens Point, and Hill became the first curator. Hill would row his boat to the wharves (illustrated) and place parcels of native Queensland plant seeds in the care of the ships’ captains, who would distribute them across the world. In reciprocation, plants from South America, including the jacaranda (Jacaranda mimosifolia); from India and South-East Asia, the ‘Flame of the Forest’ (Butea monosperma); and from Madagascar, the royal poinciana (Delonix regia), were brought to Australia on these vessels, part of the thriving exchange of botanical specimens. Brisbane Wharves at the time The painting An alien in Australia however was not as well received as Under the jacaranda when it was first shown in the Annual Exhibition of the Queensland Art Society in Brisbane. Coming to the domain of landscape painting, the most striking painting in the collection is Mr Godfrey Rivers’s Under the jacaranda (No.39), a study of one of the beautiful trees of that species in the Botanic Gardens. The artist has depicted the tree in full bloom, when its luxuriant flowers seem like a lavender-tinted haze, while the ground is littered with fallen blossoms. Under this charming shade he has placed a lady and gentleman seated at a table enjoying afternoon tea. The subject is a very pretty one, and it has been very happily treated, the general scheme of colouring being exceedingly effective. Under the jacaranda was purchased by the Trustees of the Queensland Art Gallery almost immediately for the then substantial price of £100, and its had a presence at the Gallery ever since, one of our most-loved works. Hoping to capitalise on this public approval, the following year Rivers exhibited another portrait of an individual tree — the Butea. . . . if [Rivers] had been content to take the tree and a small area of the trimly kept lawn, in the midst of which [the tree] throws its graceful shade, he would have produced a picture to which little exception could be taken, but the bandstand has also been introduced . . . The structure has a crowded look, and its presence detracts from the beauty of the picture. R. Godfrey Rivers ‘Under the jacaranda’ Rivers took this criticism to heart, sometime after the painting was exhibited he cut the painting down and reworked sections to remove all trace of the offending bandstand. The work remained in the collection of his widow, Selina Rivers, until 1941, when she presented it to the Queensland Art Gallery as An alien in Australia (the original title An alien in Queensland). This aspect of the painting’s history was not known when the Godfrey Rivers Trust gifted An alien in Australia to the Gallery. This was only verified in 2001 when Gallery Conservator’s examined the work using infrared reflectance and discovered remnants of a bandstand. Rivers had cropped the left edge of the painting (illustrated) leaving only a corner of the bandstand (illustrated), this has then been painted over and adjacent shrubbery reworked. The remaining bandstand painted over The offending bandstand at the time While the vibrant vermilion blooms of the ‘Flame of the Forest’ would have stood out against the dark greens of its home in the tropical forests of South-East Asia, in Australia, it was the showy lavender jacaranda that drew the most admiration. A writer strolling through Brisbane’s Botanic Gardens in 1886 passed by the butea, simply noting its red-orange blooms, before exclaiming that: The lovely jacaranda is perhaps the finest specimen of its kind to be seen in the colony. Not so brilliant in hue as the poinciana, nor so gorgeous as the bignonia, the delicate lavender of its profusion of blooms possesses a beauty peculiarly its own. For absolute loveliness it is unsurpassed by any of the magnificent flowering trees and shrubs which have been acclimatised here. The jacaranda, when in full bloom, is to a stranger a sight worth walking many miles to see. Seen from a distance among the green tops of sister trees, it seems as though shrouded by a beautiful blue cloud, but on closer inspection this gradually forms itself into myriads of delicate lavender blossoms, while the ground below is covered with a fairy-like carpet of the same tint, formed by the falling flowers. The jacaranda of Rivers’s painting survived until 1979, when it was blown over in a storm. A solitary specimen of the ‘Flame of the Forest’ still blooms in the Brisbane Botanic Gardens, as it has done since it was painted by Rivers. Edited extracts sourced from QAGOMA Curatorial research. Additional research and supplementary material by Elliott Murray,...
  •
    Read •

    Clouds of purple blooms, a quintessential image of Brisbane

    Few works in our Collection have enjoyed as much popularity as Under the jacaranda by R (Richard) Godfrey Rivers. Painted in 1903, some twelve years after the British-born artist arrived in Queensland, the image depicts Rivers and his wife Selina sitting in the shade of a large jacaranda tree, at that time a landmark in Brisbane’s Botanic Gardens, the first jacaranda tree grown in Australia, planted in Brisbane in 1864. R Godfrey Rivers ‘Under the jacaranda’ The jacaranda in Rivers’ painting The jacaranda tree in ‘Under the Jacaranda’ This was the first jacaranda tree grown in Australia, planted in 1864 by the Botanic Gardens Superintendent Walter Hill from an assortment of seeds and plants brought back from Brazil by the Australian wheat ships that plied the trade route to South America, the Gardens having just been established nine years earlier in 1855 on a point known as Gardens Point on the Brisbane River. Today the species is established as a Brisbane icon, and with jacaranda trees growing in most suburbs (many of the older trees were grown from the seed of this first jacaranda), Under the jacaranda may be considered a quintessential image of Brisbane. Certainly, Rivers’s sensitive rendering of the clouds of purple blossoms captures the attention of Gallery visitors and has ensured the painting’s enduring appeal. Superintendent of the Brisbane Botanic Gardens Rivers’s portrayal of an urbane couple, indulging in that most civilised of practices, the taking of tea, countered the popular conception of Brisbane society at the turn of the century, which was frequently satirised in the southern press as uncouth and unsophisticated. Many of the perceptions of Queensland as a wild and rugged place were also shaped by the highly nationalistic and strongly parochial Bulletin magazine, which idealised the colony as the natural home of the bronzed Aussie bushman. Despite the Bulletin‘s promotion of Queensland as the epitome of its tough, rural ideal, the colony was no different from the rest of Australia in the trend towards urbanisation. Still relatively new as a political and administrative entity (Queensland separated from New South Wales in 1859), Brisbane might have trailed the southern cities in the development of an urban infrastructure for much of the nineteenth century, but it made a concerted effort to catch up, and the final decades of the century saw phenomenal change as the city experienced unprecedented levels of growth. By 1891, the year in which Godfrey Rivers arrived in town, Brisbane was the fastest growing city in Australia. By the time Rivers painted Under the jacaranda in 1903, Brisbane’s cultural scene had matured, thanks in large part to his own efforts. The city now boasted a training ground for young artists at the Brisbane Technical College, of which he was art master, an Art Society, of which he had been, and would soon be again, president, and a National Art Gallery (later renamed Queensland Art Gallery), of which he was honorary curator. But while Rivers’s romantic depiction of the jacaranda’s foliage may reference the modern movement of Australian Impressionism, and surely constitutes the work’s main attraction, Under the jacaranda can only be described as a highly conventional composition. In Under the jacaranda, Rivers provided visitors to the Queensland Art Society’s 1903 Annual Exhibition with a timely view of life and class in their own city. By painting a landscape that was both urban-based and recreational, Rivers was engaging with subject matter that had gained much popularity in European art during the latter half of the nineteenth century — the depiction of the leisure pursuits of the newly affluent and powerful middle classes. Botanic Gardens, Gardens Point Botanic Gardens Bandstand Band Sunday If visitors who saw the work at the exhibition did not immediately recognise the jacaranda tree as the one growing in Brisbane’s Botanic Gardens, the maid provided them with a further clue: she wears the uniform of the waitresses who worked at the Gardens’ Kiosk. The Gardens were the favoured location for recreational and sporting activities in the city, and there were facilities for tennis, cricket, football and croquet. The less energetic could stroll along the shaded paths and planted borders, listening to the bands playing in the bandstand, or dining al fresco as part of the many picnic parties that gathered on the lawns, or at the Kiosk, which was a popular spot for afternoon teas.The Gardens were alive with activity, as one late nineteenth-century visitor discovered, noting that on entering the grounds he ‘found labels and Latin names, nursemaids, perambulators, grassy slopes, and children to my heart’s content’. Rivers often turned to the Gardens for subject matter or for a vantage point from which to paint other aspects of the city. Botanic Gardens Kiosk Botanic Gardens, Gardens Point Queensland club tennis court in the botanic gardens Queensland Club Under the jacaranda is a carefully staged image which communicates ease, respectability and self-assuredness. In this painting Rivers is neither bohemian flâneur nor rugged bushman, but a pillar of urban society, dining in gardens that boasted some of the city’s most important or exclusive buildings, including Government House, Parliament House, and the prestigious Queensland Club . The Brisbane of Godfrey and Selina Rivers in Under the jacaranda is not a frontier town with a ‘make-do’ ethos, but one in which residents, at least those enjoying the Rivers’s vantage point, could experience all the comforts of life. Edited extract from ‘Looking for the ‘Beau Mode’ in Brisbane: Godfrey Rivers Under the jacaranda‘ by Sara Tiffin from Brought to Light: Australian Art 1850-1965, Queensland Art Gallery, 1998. Additional research and supplementary material by Elliott Murray, Senior Digital Marketing Officer, QAGOMA