Fire's On Arthur Streeton Analysis

In this response, I intend to discuss Arthur Streeton’s Fire’s On, a 183.8 x 122.5cm oil on canvas painting, produced in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, Australia in 1891, after “nationalistic sentiment” had taken its toll with the centennial of the European settlement. Fire’s On depicts the steep “walls of rock” “crowned” with “bronze green” “gums” and the “crest mouth” that he encountered on his journey through the Blue Mountains. Streeton created this painting to justly portray the rough, “glor[ious]”, unsung landscape of Australia, namely its “great, gold plains” and “hot, trying winds”. Thus, Streeton defied the inaccurate depictions of Australian landscape produced in the early nineteenth century by early immigrants, showing “green
The individual elements that can be seen in the picture plane include the “deep blue”, cloudless sky, the foreground for which is the steep “walls of rock”, “run[ning] high up” and “crown[ed]” with “gums bronze green”. The “deep blue azure heaven”, flat and unvarying across the backdrop, as well as the steepness of the crest and the tonal sharpness and irregular form of the rocks, are together an expression of “nationalistic sentiment”, distinguishing Australian from European landscape and “celebrat[ing] the [latter’s] unique qualities”. Incidentally, the scarcely perceptible miners depicted in Fire’s On, render the Australian terrain heroic, as it undoubtedly overshadows the “human drama” shown within the picture plane. Furthermore, the smoke that radiates from the “great dragon’s mouth”, the focal point of the painting, evokes in the viewer Streeton’s fascination with the transience of fire. This is characteristic of an Impressionist, as such a painter seeks to capture the shifting effects of light and colour with the greatest
Having said that, Streeton’s body of work was both celebrated and scrutinized, as within every audience there will be some who are for the status quo and some against it. On the contrary, contemporary viewers of Streeton’s Fire’s On, would presumably understand the painting to be a traditional landscape, due to the multitude of contemporary landscape paintings that we see today, which embody non-naturalistic colour and composition and steer clear of illusory depth of field and realistic representation of subject matter. Streeton’s objective of communicating, in its fullest, the ruggedness and the heroism of the Australian landscape, although potentially seen as irrelevant to contemporary viewers, reminds them of the nature of the terrain on which they currently stand, before it was domesticated in accordance with the rise of civilization. So, despite that much of the Australian terrain is now cultivated, Streeton’s Fire’s On is one of many works that immortalises the “great, gold plains” and “hot, trying winds” that are characteristic of Australian