EUGENE VON GUERARD AND GEORG VON NEUMAYER: RECORDED JOURNEYS

摘要

Born in Vienna in 1811, the landscape painter Eugene von Guerard painted in Italy and Germany before making the adventurous decision to travel to the other side of the world to explore the landscapes of the Australian 'new world'. He arrived in December 1852 and spent 13 months on the Ballarat goldfields (he experienced only modest success as a miner), before making Melbourne the base for his career as a landscape painter. In the 1850s and 1860s, inspired by Alexander von Humboldt's ideas about art and the role of the artist, von Guerard embarked on a series of sketching expeditions to some of the most rugged and remote reaches of the colonies of Victoria, South Australia, New South Wales and Tasmania. He joined Georg von Neumayer on two of the expeditions undertaken by the scientist as part of his magnetic survey of the Colony of Victoria. In April 1862 von Guerard and the telegraph engineer S.W. McGowan joined Neumayer and the artist Nicholas Chevalier on an expedition to the densely vegetated and sparsely populated region of Cape Otway on the southern tip of Victoria's western coast. Later in the same year he travelled with Neumayer, his assistant Edward Brinkmann and a guide, John Twynham on an expedition through north eastern Victoria that culminated in the ascent of Australia's highest peak, Mt Kosciuszko. A local guide, Mr Weston, joined them for the final ascent.