Lot 120: HENRY BURN (1807?-1884)

Richmond Park
signed and dated 'H Burn/1873' (lower left); titled 'Richmond Park between/Melbourne and Richmond Cricket Grounds' on label (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
58.5 x 88.7 cm

(possibly) Melbourne, Victorian Academy of Arts 4th Annual Exhibition, 1874, cat. no. 237, (titled Richmond Paddock)
Melbourne, Joseph Brown Gallery, Winter Exhibition, 7-18 June 1976, cat.no. 6

Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne

Views of bustling, gold rich Melbourne were staple fare for many artists working in the city in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s. Some like George Rowe or Samuel Calvert worked in watercolour or lithographic print. Others, among them J H Carse, Henry Gritten, Thomas Clark worked in oil. Ludwig Becker and Henry Burn worked in oil and watercolour. The displays in the splendid, recently opened, Cowen Gallery at the State Library of Victoria show that, apart from the German artist Becker, Henry Burn was the best recorder of the city during this period.

Most of Henry Burn's images are small in size, the exception being his large two-sheet topographically useful lithograph, Panoramic View of the City of Melbourne 1856 which was 4ft long. This painting, Richmond Park 1873 is larger than most of these and approximates the size of his most important Melbourne work, Swanston Street from Princes Bridge 1861, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. Both these paintings and the State Library works show Henry Burn at his best and distinguished from the others, particularly Gritten and Carse, by a quality of attractive airiness and genuine ability to capture the cityscape bathed in light.

These sometimes almost pretty Melbourne views were produced for consumption by the city's new commercial middle class or Colonial interest "back home" in Great Britain. Paintings by Burn and others, of the Punt Road ferry, the Yarra at Studley Park, Dight's Falls from Richmond Bridge, Richmond Park or Paddock, The King's Domain and Ferdinand von Mueller's Botanic Gardens, many specific leisure or pleasure spots, were produced in great numbers. Their popularity is indicative of the demands, novel to the then Australian experience - of a highly urbanized, elegant, rather self-absorbed metropolis - one that by 1870, apart from other accoutrements, would proudly boast its own National Gallery, Art School and Victorian Academy of Arts.

Richmond Park or Paddock, also known as the Survey Paddock, on the Yarra was and attractive rural spot close to the city and favoured by picnickers. Nicholas Chevalier and others had painted the park previously and Louis Buvelot was to paint it in the early 1870s. Melbournians celebrating there in the heat of Christmas Day are the subject of an engaging wood engraving (after Chevalier) by Frederick Grosse which was published in David Syme's The Australian News for Home Readers in 1864.

Richmond Park was painted a number of times by Henry Burn but never on the scale of this work of 1873 and never with the crowded, action packed activity of Chevalier's Christmas Day image. Burn's rather sedate, bucolic scene is enlivened by the inclusion of that great 19th Century innovation, the steam train. In this case a modern city's public transport system - the "Melbourne and Suburban Railway" line to Hawthorn. A train later painted (though closer to the city from Yarra Bank) by Tom Roberts' in his "The 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition" panel Evening train to Hawthorn c1889.

We are grateful to John Jones for providing this catalogue entry

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