Elder Wing of Australian Art: Audio Described Tour
Work 2 of 15

John Glover was born in England in 1767 and showed a talent for drawing at an early age. He was a successful landscape painter in England before migrating to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) in 1831 where he bought land and set up a farm near Launceston. Glover’s Tasmanian landscapes demonstrate his liking for natural bushland and how he developed a new approach to capturing the effects of Australian sunlight. He worked outside using a palette of olive greens, misty greys and strong blues to depict the unique qualities of the native Australian environment.

A view of the artists house and garden, in Mills Plains, Van Diemen’s Land depicts Glover’s Patterdale farm at Deddington Northern Tasmania on a bright summer’s day. His shingle roofed stone house and wooden studio are surrounded by his flourishing garden. Glover brought plants and seeds with him on the long journey from England and planned the garden while on the ship. Today this wouldn’t be possible as Australia has one of the world’s strictest quarantine policies. Biosecurity legislation restricts the movement of living things to prevent the spread of pests and diseases between states in order to protect the environment.

Although Glover has delighted in presenting his (introduced) plants thriving, he has also depicted the natural bushland beyond the edges of the garden, showing the distinctive foliage of the Tasmanian manna gum tress.

A view of the artist’s house and garden, in Mills Plains, Van Diemen’s land by John Glover, a British-born, Australian colonial artist is a landscape format oil on canvas painting. Created in 1835 it is 76.4cm high and 114.4cm wide.

The painting depicts the house and garden of the artist in the early stages of the colony in Van Diemen’s land, what is now known as Tasmania.

In the left of the painting is a two-storey pale brown stone house with a low dark-brown slate tile roof and two short chimneys. It has a central brown door, two rectangular doors at ground level, and three rectangular windows at the upper level. The windows are multi-paned, smaller square pieces of glass in brown rectangular wooden frames.

In front of, and partially obscuring the house, is a second smaller single-storeyed building. Made of the same material as the main house but with a high triangular-peaked roof, a fruit or nut tree grows against the building. At the base of the tree is a low box with an angled glass-paned top, a small glass house usually used to grow cucumbers.

At the front of this smaller building is a verandah. A slate roof held up by vertical poles with climbing vines.

Two straight narrow brown gravel paths extend from the bottom of the painting to the house. An English style cottage garden grows either side of the paths, the plants are plentiful and in full bloom.

The garden includes low green bushes dotted with round pink roses; cone-shaped hollyhocks, clusters of yellow or red blooms on long vertical green stems; large round green bushes covered with small white flowers; and plants with multiple vertical stems covered with tiny yellow blooms.

In the right of the painting is an open grassed area around a pond of water. The pendulous branches of a willow tree lean over the pond, and tree ferns stand either side, clusters of upwardly pointing yellow and green feathered leaves. A third tree fern, taller on a brown vertical trunk, stands at the edge of the garden between the house and the pond.

In the upper right behind the pond and trees is a large pyramid-shaped mountain. In the upper left above the rooftop of the house are more distant rounded mountains. A wild forest of white trunked eucalyptus trees and native grasses cloak the mountain slopes.

Across the top of the painting is the blue sky. Fluffy clouds are created with clusters of white and grey strokes of paint. The sun, a small white circle in the upper right, radiates a glowing light.