Title

Fine arts. Everybody knows the initials S.T.G. [Victoria Illustrated by S.T.Gill, published by Sands & Kenny]

Author

My Note Book.

Details

My Note Book, 3 January 1857, page 5, column 2.

Publication date

3 January 1857

Type

Publication Review

Language

English

Country of context

Australia

Full text

Fine Arts
Everybody knows the initials S.T.G.; I mean everybody in Victoria who has the least feeling for pictorial art. From time to time there have been published with this signature, lithographs of various kinds, being representations of localities more or less familiar to the dwellers in this golden land. Many of these have gone to England in the shape of letter paper, not a few are hung upon our walls, and many are enshrined in scrap books. Sands and Kenny have selected from the best of them, and, together with some that have not been published, sent them home where they have undergone the process of steel engraving, and they now come to us as “Victoria Illustrated”, and a very elegant Book they make, bound up in scarlet and gold, and very well worthy they are to lie upon drawing room table, or to take honourable place upon shelf of library. We are told that none of these have been issued in England: I hope this is the case, for if I should, as probably I may, send one to a particular friend at home and he or she (as the case may be) should send me word that it has been on the table for six months, I should consider myself as considerably taken in. As works of art I think these engravings highly meritorious; I have looked at each one very carefully, and though I have discovered small defects, yet, taking them as a whole, I have little to complain of. This commendation is however simply with reference to them as works of art, and it regards only such general qualities as belong to all pictorial representations. I could have wished, however, that the engraver had been himself intimate with Victorian scenery and Victorian usages, for there are here and there such manifest indications of these views having been engraved at a distance from the country of their first production, as drawings, that some of the essential qualities are often wanting in consequence. Every artist who has lived in Australia, knows that one special quality of the foliage is a kind of raggedness, and that the masses are broken up into irregular patches, quite different from the large oval shaped forms which characterize the trees in an English landscape. The engraver of these views, evidently puzzled with this peculiarity of broken masses, has made a kind of compromise between the two kinds, and the result is neither gum tree, nor elm, nor oak, but trees of doubtful botanical character. So, too, in the skies; they are all too English; and the distances are too much blended after the manner of the beautiful moist effects so constantly seen in our own dear island home. In some of the local characteristics, too, there is occasionally amusing evidence of this lack of artistic colonial experience; for instance: in one of the illustrations we have a police constable on whose head is neither the chimney-pot covering which is the home head-piece of the force, nor the lighter cap which has been adopted here. It would seem as if the engraver had been embarrassed at finding a policeman with a cap on, and thinking it might be inadvertency of the artist he had, as in the case of the trees, adopted a middle course. But these are minor qualifications to the general excellence of the work, which I have no doubt will meet with an extensive sale, and repay the enterprising publishers, who must have incurred great expense, and have experienced some difficulties in bringing out so beautiful a work under the disadvantage of its being executed at such a distance from the scene of its immediate interest.

[My Note Book, 3 January 1857, p.5, col.2.]