The Artist as Traveller: The sketchbooks of Eugene von Guérard
Ruth Pullin
Art Gallery of Ballarat
The ground-breaking vision of German Romantic, Alexander von Humbolt’s natural and physical world stirred the imagination of a generation in the mid 19th century to journey to unfamiliar territories.
Eugene von Guérard set out to find new landscapes to record in countries as far away as Australia and New Zealand. In the tradition of German artists to enrich their artistic training, von Guérard, aged 12, travelled to Italy with his father (also an artist) thus beginning a lifelong occupation of using sketchbooks as the lexicon with which to describe the lands he explored. This monograph shows the breadth of his exploration in chaptered accounts and features illustrated pages from the total collection of 47 books.