Lot 52: ISAAC WHITEHEAD (1819-1881)

Oil on canvas
Signed and dated 1872 lower right; inscribed with artist's name and title on label on the reverse

60 by 90 cm

Fourth Annual Exhibition of the Victorian Academy of Art, Melbourne, 1874, cat. 92

Lauraine Diggins Gallery, Melbourne (label on the reverse)
Private collection, Western Australia

Isaac Whitehead was judged 'the most successful' of all the Australian landscape painters in a Melbourne exhibition in 1874 (Sheen, P., in Kerr, J. (ed.), The Dictionary of Australian Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engravers to 1870, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992, p. 857). He had arrived in Australia during the Victorian gold rush of the 1850s and was a close contemporary of von Guérard and Buvelot in Melbourne. As well as painting, he worked as an artist-framer, producing some of the finest frames of the colonial era for his own and fellow artists' work. He received a silver medal at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878, and another medal for paintings submitted for exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. His paintings were also seen in the Sydney and Melbourne international exhibitions of 1879-80 and posthumously in 1880. His paintings are superbly detailed, presenting an optimistic view of a new world landscape awaiting European settlement. Here a timber-getter with his dog make their way along a sunlit roadway near Lilydale.