William Charles Piguenit

(1836-1915)

(Cooks River, Botany Bay), 1880

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Private collection
Lennox Gallery, Sydney, c.1955, as Cooks River, Botany Bay From Livingstone Road, New South Wales (label attached verso)
Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED
possibly, Royal Art Society of New South Wales, 2nd Annual Exhibition, 1881, cat. 36, as Cooks River, Botany Bay
W.C Piguenit 1836-1914: Retrospective, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 16 December 1992 - 14 February 1993; then touring, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 10 March - 25 April 1993; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 13 May - 4 July 1993, cat. 11, Landscape with Figures, Tasmania (label attached verso)

LITERATURE
possibly, 'The Art Society's Exhibition', The Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser, Sydney, 15 October 1881, p.649
possibly, 'The N.S.W. Art Society's Exhibition', The Sydney Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 15 October 1881, p.6
Christa Johannes and Anthony Brown, W.C Piguenit 1836-1914: Retrospective, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 1992, p. 47 (illus.), p. 100


'William Charles Piguenit was the last important colonial landscape painter in Australia, a romantic realist inspired by the power and beauty of nature... His impressive pictures of Tasmania's wild mountain ranges, lakes and highlands, his dramatic views of the Grose Valley, the Nepean and the Hawkesbury, his sweeping panoramas of the flooded plains of inland New South Wales and his gentle, almost dreamlike views of sunrises and sunsets along Sydney's Lane Cove River had helped to win him wide critical appreciation. His pictures were popular and sold better than most.

Piguenit had little interest in the commonplace where his younger contemporaries would soon find many of the subjects for their plein air paintings. He was in search of grander visions. He periodically joined the eminent surveyors and amateur explorers of Tasmania on exceedingly arduous excursions into the interior of the State, just 'to bear testimony, from an artist's point of view, to the wealth of beauty that exists, comparatively unknown, in this terra incognita. In 1875, he was the only artist sufficiently hardy to commit himself for more than a few days to the photographic and sketching camps which Eccleston du Faur, a founder of the New South Wales Academy of Art, set up in the barely explored Grose Valley of the Blue Mountains.

In the early 1880s he made sketching trips to the drought-ridden pasture lands around Dubbo, and in the 1890s to the disastrous floods at Bourke. But he also found splendid views on his regular morning and evening walks around his home...'1

In March of 1880, Piguenit along with his parents and niece followed his sisters and relocated from Tasmania to Sydney. First establishing themselves at 'Saintonge', on Warren Road, Marrickville, a short walk from where the present subject appears to be situated. Set at twilight, Piguenit emphasizes the vast sweep of the river out to the mouth of Botany Bay. The final hours of sun light up the horizon drawing the eye to the distant buildings, the Botany Water Pumping Station, which operated from 1858 to 1886. An important part of Sydney's early water supply system and now the location of Sydney's Kingsford Smith Airport.

1. Christa Johannes and Anthony Brown, W.C Piguenit 1836-1914: Retrospective, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 1992, p. 9