The Artists of the Atlas: Their Role in Creating Settler-Colonial Australia’s Visual Culture

Abstract

Discussions of Australian art in the run-up to Federation have long focused on the iconic works of Melbourne’s leading impressionist painters. However, it was the wood-engraved pictures of settler-colonial Australia’s illustrated press, especially in Sydney, that dominated its visual culture in the second half of the 19th century. Between 1885 and 1900, the influence of Sydney’s artist-illustrators reached new heights, thanks to the appearance of the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia. This extravagantly illustrated publication was widely hailed as marking “the birth of art beneath the Southern Cross”. The artists of the Atlas succeeded not only in consolidating a settler-colonial iconography of Australia’s history, achievements and prospects but also in disseminating it through their later work for the Sydney Mail, the London Graphic and the Bulletin. Led by Julian Ashton, they transformed Sydney into the epicentre of Australian settler art, drawing Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton into their orbit by the 1890s. Following the illustrated press’s abandonment of wood engraving, these artists continued to influence Australia’s visual culture via other media up to and including the First World War. Revisiting Sydney’s golden age of illustration offers a new window onto the art most Australians saw.