About the Author

Starting my collection. 

I increasingly considered the Hermannsburg School to be worthy of study. For two years I had tried unsuccessfully to buy a fine Albert Namatjira watercolour but had always been outbid. I saw every Albert offered in Melbourne by the major auction houses. Any painting in good condition with a tree was repeatedly out of reach, financially.

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Artists Activity Timeline

Observations from the Activity Chart of the stages of The Hermannsburg School.

The chart shows each artist in order of starting to paint seriously in watercolour landscape. It omits wooden souvenir artefacts or sporadic drawing or painting attempts before starting to paint with some regularity.

Read: Artists Activity Timeline beginning in the 1930s

Evaluation

The wider impacts of The Hermannsburg School.

From the mid 1940s, when sellout exhibitions triumphed in the capital cities, tourists sought to buy paintings on visits to Central Australia. Being an art of emotion, the romantic landscapes appealed readily to ‘middlebrow’ tastes of the attentive public, while scholarly critics were not trained to assess the conceptual spiritual nature of Aboriginal art made for sale rather than for ceremony for ‘those in the know’.

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Manuscript References

Publications, Media, Government Documents, Public Collections Research Access.

Read: Manuscript References