History Talk
Glover, Knut Bull and Taniwha: Romanticizing Colonisation
Come for a guided walk through Bellerive and Kangaroo Bay as we explore the iconic locations where colonial artists like Glover and Piguenit painted their favourite views of Hobart Town, finishing at the amazing Taniwha installation on Kangaroo Bay. For generations artists have chosen this area of the eastern shore to paint Hobart and kunanyi, come along and find out why.
There’s something about the eastern shore that has attracted artists for a long time. Mostly it’s the view of Hobart but also it’s the ability to step away from the town and get an outsider’s view.
That seems to have been what John Glover was wanting to achieve with Mount Wellington and Hobart Town from Kangaroo Point. Thanks to the development of Glover’s viewpoint as a defensive battery – the Bellerive Battery – the location is still accessible and still bears some resemblance to the famous painting.
The awful irony with this painting is that Glover painted it between 1831-1833, by which time George Augustus Robinson was on his mission to ‘conciliate’ Aboriginal peoples out of their homeland; Glover’s painting, beautiful as it is, captures the pathos of that moment.
Another artist who liked painting from the eastern shore was Knut Bull, a Norwegian painter who found his way to Tasmania via a conviction for counterfeiting (the crime of choice for artists). He arrived in Tasmania in 1846 and is widely regarded as a pioneer of Australian landscape painting. Coming after the death of Glover, Bull was the only professional landscape painter in Hobart at the time. Bull, like many artists, seems to have had a fascination with kunanyi / Mount Wellington, which he captured beautifully from a vantage point on the Bellerive foreshore.
William Charles (WC) Piguenit was, unlike Bull and Glover, born in Tasmania. Like many artists of the 19th century he began his career as a draftsman, eventually retiring in 1873 to follow his avocation as a painter. Piguenit has left to posterity many views of both urban and natural scenes in Tasmania and New South Wales, in some cases paintings which capture the sublime. Piguenit’s 1910 painting View of Hobart, Mount Wellington from Kangaroo Bay captures the oft admired view with a very modern impressionist touch.
And because it’s currently Ten Days on the Island, we are lucky enough to have the amazing Taniwha Time Machine as the finishing point of our walk, connecting stories of colonized Van Diemen’s Land with memories of another colonized land, Aotearoa.
