GILL, ALFRED NAYLOR (1872-1945)

"Leading The Flock, Dandenong Ranges" (1921)
oil on panel
34 x 59cm
signed lower right
*private collection, Sydney
 
Alfred Naylor Gill is a forgotten, award-winning Australian Impressionist. He was son of prominent English-expat, Melbourne based picture frame manufacturer and gilder, Alfred Gill (1840-1932). Gill's Fine Art Gallery operated for 50 years across South Yarra, Prahran & St Kilda, servicing & exhibiting important artists of the period including Norman Lindsay, Arthur Streeton, Rupert Bunny, John Longstaff & Emma Minnie Boyd. As an apprentice to his father, Naylor would have had close contact to works of the Heidelberg School (Australian Impressionists), & clearly took inspiration from them. Little is known about Gill's artistic background. He first came to prominence in the mid 1890s when he won first prize in the Collingwood Industrial Exhibition, which lead to numerous commissions. According to a newspaper in 1896: "Mr. Gill's excellence lays in his being able to faith fully depict (by the brush), that smoky haze which is so peculiar to Australian scenery, also in his producing in a realistic manner, the gum trees with the bark partially stripped off." He started exhibiting Impressionist landscapes at his father's gallery around 1900, & established himself as a respected painter in Melbourne over the following years. He even held a huge exhibition at the Athaneaum with his father, also a talented painter. He was a longtime member of the Victorian Artists' Society & Yarra Sculptor's Society, & regularly exhibited with them. Gill's best known works were of bushfire scenes; illuminated, dramatic landscapes evoking the oeuvre of Eugene Von Guerrard. The vast majority of his works were of areas in the Dandenong Ranges & Healesville, east of Melbourne. His work was certainly admired on a level reserved for his Heidelberg School contemporaries, & his work was collected with similar vigor. However, despite being a revered artist in his lifetime, he all but vanished from the history books. Shockingly, his work is absent from major Galleries in Australia.