Eugen Guérard

Johann Joseph Eugen von Guérard

Photo: painting Johann Joseph Eugen von Guérard (known in Australia as Eugène), Australia's most important romantic landscape painter of the third quarter of the 1800s, arrived at Geelong on 28th December 1852 on the Windermere. He was born in Vienna; his father, Bernhard, was a court painter to Emperor Franz I of Austria. Eugène and his father went to Rome where Eugène studied landscape painting 1830-32. After the death of his father he went to Düsseldorf, where he studied at the Kunstakademie approx from 1838-45. Von Guérard stayed in Düsseldorf until 1852, when he spent a short time working in England as drawing tutor to the son of Augustus Tulk, who later became the first librarian of the Melbourne Public Library. Lured by the news of the gold rushes, he sailed to Victoria. Von Guérard first spent 13 months on the goldfields near Ballarat (and made many sketches of life on the diggings) before continuing his career as a painter in Melbourne. On 15th July 1854 he married Louise Arnz, the daughter of a Düsseldorf publisher whom he had known back in Germany. He travelled widely in south-eastern Australia and is best-known for grandiose, romantic paintings of the Australian Alps and of the goldfields areas. When Georg Neumayer was conducting a magnetic survey for the Victorian colonial government, Von Guérard travelled with him. Paintings of his were included in international exhibitions in London, Paris and Philadelphia, and in 1870 he became the first director of the Melbourne National Gallery and School of Art. He returned to Düsseldorf in 1882.

Painting above: Old Ballarat as it was in the summer of 1853-54 (detail), Eugène von Guérard, 1884, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery.

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