LLEWELLYN-JONES, JOHN (1866-1927)

"Rose Bay Looking Towards Point Piper" (1924)
Oil on canvas laid on card
22.5 x 30cm
Signed lower right
*private collection, Sydney
 
Jones is a forgotten Australian Impressionist and member of the Heidelberg School. He studied painting at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School under George Folingsby between 1883-89. He was an early member of both the Box Hill artists' camp, established in 1885, & the Heidelberg camp, where, alongside Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder & others, he painted the Australian landscape en plein air using impressionist techniques. During this time, he was a member of the Buonarotti Club, one of Melbourne's leading bohemian arts clubs of the mid-1880s. Streeton gifted a number of his Heidelberg works to Jones, including Impression for Golden Summer (1888), the basis of his now-iconic landscape Golden Summer, Eaglemont (1889). In 1890, Jones and Streeton submitted a number of their Heidelberg works to the Victorian Artists Society's winter show, which attracted the attention of Art Gallery of NSW trustees on visit from Sydney. Regarding the pair as "most promising young artists", they purchased both Jones' The Dry Season & Streeton's An Australian Gloaming, making them some of the first Heidelberg School works to enter a public collection. The Dry Season was later included in the 1898 Exhibition of Australian Art in London, among other works by Jones. Living in Sydney towards the end of his life, Jones continued to paint, mostly in watercolour. While Streeton wrote of him as a significant early proponent of plein-airism in Australia, Jones has, compared to other members of the Melbourne "artists' camps", languished in relative obscurity. A watercolour study of this fascinating oil painting appears in "John Llewellyn Jones; Australia's Forgotten Painter".