Landscape Art and the Blue Mountains (First Edition, Fine Binding)

SPEIRS, Hugh (foreword C. Manning Clark; preface John Olsen). Landscape Art and the Blue Mountains. Chippendale, Sydney: Alternative Publishing Co-operative Limited, 1981.

Quarto. Quarter tan Morocco leather and marbled paper boards, subsequently and handsomely rebound in this style by a private binder. Spine with five raised bands, lettered in gilt. xx, 203 pp. 150 illustrations throughout, the majority in black and white with some in colour. 2 colour maps. Illustrated endpapers. Bibliography and index. First edition. Publisher's original cloth replaced by a private binding.

The Blue Mountains west of Sydney have drawn artists since the moment the landscape became accessible to them. The crossing of the mountains by Blaxland, Lawson, and Wentworth in 1813 opened the western interior and established the Mountains as a passage between worlds; the subsequent development of the railway line and the resort towns of Katoomba, Leura, and Blackheath made the escarpments, the eucalyptus forests, and the extraordinary atmospheric effects of the deep sandstone valleys available to painters who could not otherwise have reached them. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the Blue Mountains became one of the defining subjects of Australian landscape painting, attracting artists from the Heidelberg School tradition and beyond.

Hugh Speirs's study is the first comprehensive survey of this tradition. An investigation of over 220 serious artists who worked in the Blue Mountains area across the full span of European settlement in the region, examining not only the individual artists and their works but the artistic, historical, and environmental conditions that shaped what they saw and how they painted it. The approach is as much intellectual as documentary: Speirs is interested in the relationship between a specific landscape and the art it produces, and in the ways in which the particular qualities of the Blue Mountains light, colour, and topography pressed painters toward specific solutions and away from others.

The foreword is by C. Manning Clark (1915–1991), the greatest Australian historian of his generation and the author of the six-volume A History of Australia. The preface is by John Olsen (1928–2023), one of the most significant Australian artists of the twentieth century — a painter whose gestural, exuberant response to the Australian landscape, and whose decades of sustained production, gave him the authority to speak about landscape art in Australia from the inside. Olsen was appointed Officer of the Order of Australia and received the Archibald Prize; he remained one of the defining presences in Australian art until his death in 2023.

The Alternative Publishing Co-operative, established in Chippendale in the inner west of Sydney, was among the more significant small independent publishers of the late 1970s and early 1980s in New South Wales, producing books that commercial publishers were unlikely to commission on subjects of local and cultural significance.

Near fine in a subsequent private binding of quality. Two small spots to upper fore-edge of text block; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000620