AT THE MUSEUM
THIS PRETTY LANDSCAPE PAINTING ON A GUM LEAF IS ON DISPLAY AT THE MURRAY ART MUSEUM ALBURY.
FAMILY, FRIENDS, AND LOVERS have often sent gum leaves to Australians living overseas. The scent is a sure way to remind them of home and invoke homesickness. Messages of goodwill were even written and painted on gum leaves sent to soldiers fighting in the Crimean and the First and Second World Wars. Fragile and ephemeral, only a few examples survive. However, the art of Alfred William Eustace has proved more enduring.
Eustace was born in England in 1820 and came to Australia with his wife and children in 1851, at the time of the gold rushes. Working as a shepherd, he eventually settled in Chiltern in north-east Victoria, where he worked on a relative’s property. Self-taught artist Eustace carried a small box of oil paints and painted on gum leaves, a readily available support for his miniature landscapes. His favoured gum leaves were those of the juvenile white box (Eucalyptus albens) which can be as large as 10 x 15 cm. On these he painted the landscapes he knew, and sometimes the bark slab huts built by early settlers. Some landscapes can be identified as of the Beechworth, Ovens Valley, and Chiltern areas.
While Eustace also had a career as house painter and sign writer when living in Albury, and played several musical instruments well enough to supply the music for local dances, it is for his gum leaf paintings that he became famous. They were exhibited in colonial exhibitions and in the 1886 London Colonial and Indian Exhibition. Several paintings were presented to Queen Victoria and by the 1890s he had received commissions from foreign dignitaries and the governors of Victoria and New South Wales. Eustace died in 1907 and his work can be found in several public collections, including that of the Murray Art Museum Albury and the National Gallery of Australia.
Murray Art Museum Albury, 546 Dean Street, Albury, NSW, 02 6043 5800, mamalbury.com.au