Looking toward Amiens down Somme Valley from Blangy-Tronville

Place Europe: France, Picardie, Somme
Accession Number ART12645
Collection type Art
Measurement sheet: 25.3 x 36.7 cm (irreg.); image: 22.4 x 36.4 cm
Object type Work on paper
Physical description pen and sepia ink, brush and sepia ink, watercolour, graphite pencil, carbon pencil on paper
Maker Streeton, Arthur
Place made France: Picardie, Somme
Date made 1918
Conflict First World War, 1914-1918
Copyright

Item copyright: Copyright expired - public domain

Public Domain Mark This item is in the Public Domain

Description

Depicts a view of Amiens through the Somme Valley from Blangy-Tronville, with buildings in the right mid ground and the Amiens Cathedral spire visible in the distance, observed by the artist while in France in the First World War. Arthur Streeton is best known as one of the painters of the Heidelberg School in Melbourne in the late nineteenth century. His name is linked with Tom Roberts, Charles Conder, and Frederick McCubbin as responsible for developing in Australia an impressionist technique of painting, and depicting scenes that embraced the nationalistic concerns of the last two decades of the nineteenth century. During his lifetime he was acknowledged as the finest painter of the Australian landscape; he was the first Australian painter to be honoured by a retrospective exhibition in his own lifetime; and only the second to be knighted.

In 1918 while based in London, he was appointed by the Australian War Memorial as an official war artist and travelled to France to record the involvement of Australians in the battles taking place along the Somme River. During the period of his employment he produced ten paintings and eighty-six drawings that are held by the Memorial. These were all executed in the years 1918 and 1919. The Memorial later purchased his HMS Renown, Sydney Harbour painted in 1922, and commissioned several large paintings of significant wartime subjects.

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