Edition: U.S. / Global

ART REVIEW; Ripe for the Painting: Landscapes in 2 British Colonies

Published: February 26, 1999

In the early 19th century, Australia and the United States had a fair amount in common. Although immigration to Australia started nearly 200 years later than in this country, both nations began as British colonies. Both had indigenous, pre-European populations. Almost equal in land mass, the two also had vast expanses of virgin territory, rife with unexploited scenery made for the painter's brush.

These similarities -- and many differences -- play into ''New Worlds From Old: 19th-Century Australian and American Landscapes'' at the Corcoran Gallery of Art here. A big, solidly packed survey of the century when landscape painting peaked in both countries, the show was organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. It is not only the first time that Australian and American landscapes from this era have been shown together, it is also the first exhibition of such a large group of historical Australian landscapes outside that country.

Altogether, more than 100 works are on view, by artists ranging from Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt to Winslow Homer and William Merritt Chase on the American front; from John Glover and Eugene von Guerard to Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton on the Australian side. The paintings are grouped in five categories, starting with wilderness images and ending with the bustle of civilization.

One of the most striking differences between Australia and the United States is the terrain. Australia is essentially a flat, arid country with few river systems whose highest peak, Mount Kosciusko, rises only 7,328 feet. Its flora and fauna are spectacular, but the landscape is short on set pieces like the Rocky Mountains, Niagara Falls and Kentucky's Mammoth Cave.

So, in terms of imagery at least, American painters had a big advantage. It would be hard for an Australian artist to compete with the immense visual power of Frederic E. Church's ''Niagara Falls'' (1857), a close-up rendering of the mighty waters that reflects the energy and optimism of a dynamic country. Or Albert Bierstadt's ''Mount Corcoran'' (1875-77), a grandiose rendition of snow-clad peaks in the Sierra Nevada that climb more than 14,000 feet high.

Still, Australians brought talent and vigor to their own subject matter. The Bierstadt of Australia, von Guerard (1811-1901) -- European-born and German-trained, like Bierstadt -- was attracted to mountains, too, and painted them with feeling. His ''Mount William From Mount Dryden, Victoria'' (1857), the highest peak of the Grampian Ranges, takes a view over a long patch of scrub to show the mountain almost floating in the distance like a ship, topped by a crown of clouds. Although less majestic than Bierstadt's Mount Corcoran, which is actually a composite of several peaks, it is still a magnificent specimen of mountainhood, a symbol of power and potency that made other landscape events look puny.

Australian and American artists did not, of course, escape European traditions. Their work was fed -- particularly in the case of Americans, who were more apt to measure their work against Old World achievements -- by notions of the sublime, regarded as the revelation of God's presence in the grandeur of nature. But they were also engaged by the picturesque, or a pleasing irregularity in the arrangement of forms, a concept derived from the 17th-century landscape painting of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain.

At the start of the 19th century, however, painting in the two countries took very different approaches. Whereas Americans had once feared the wilderness, they began to celebrate its freshness and novelty, associating it with a political order free from the immoralities of Europe.

Cole's ''Clove, Catskills'' (1826) is a case in point. It proclaims the glories of a scenic notch between peaks of the Catskill Mountains, its rocky slopes covered with trees and scrub in autumnal colors. Storm clouds overhead and bare branches in the foreground illustrate the power of nature over civilization and the passage of time, both elements of the sublime. A cliched Indian stands dramatically poised on a rock in the picture's middle as if hailing the splendor of the scene. (Since Indians had all but disappeared from the region by this time, the figure is pure allegory.) The painting is a celebration of America and its natural wonders, with a shiver of premonition that they might not last.

A later example of the sublime in painting was Church's ''Natural Bridge, Virginia'' (1852). The bridge, an arch of rock over Cedar Creek in the Shenandoah Valley, was once owned by Thomas Jefferson, who bought it from King George III in 1774. Thought to have been created through a cataclysmic event, the expanse of rock inspired awe in both settlers and Indians, who called it the ''Bridge of God.'' In Church's painting, a black guide at the bottom thought to be one of Jefferson's slaves explains the bridge to a rapt white tourist.

Australians, whose settlement began as a penal colony in 1788, held for some time a perception of their land as unwelcoming and unappealing, even though they appreciated the exoticism of its flora and fauna. A humorous look at the forbidding country is Augustus Earle's ''A Bivouac of Travelers in Australia in a Cabbage Tree Forest, Daybreak'' circa 1838. The scene is the Illawarra region of New South Wales, densely forested with jungly vegetation. A group of travelers guided by Aborigines and bivouacked overnight yawn and stretch before an open fire, inflecting the spooky landscape with their cheerful human presence.