Cook Nimbra, Queensland, Australia. Marianne North (1830-1890). 1880. Oil on paper. H H 16.4 x W 25.5 cm. Collection of the Herbarium, Library, Art & Archives, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Accession no. MNS47, given by Dame Janet Vaughan, 1978. Photo credit: The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Unusually for North, there is little precision in the foreground here, and an impressionistic deployment of colour in the path and grass. Trees give definition either side of a small settlement, and the sky glows in a muted yellow above a low range of bluish hills. This perhaps is the scene which she painted:
We passed no inhabited house till we came to the M.'s cosy farm of many low wooden buildings, with two or three huge chimneys like pyramids attached, built round a kind of court, with a pretty mixed garden of fruit and flowers, and an old- fashioned barn and pigeon-house under the trees. The whole was on the top of a small hill, with fine views all round.... [II: 112]
It was cold while North was in Queensland "the climate of subtropical Queensland was rather different from what I had expected," II: 110), and she was sometimes rushed, often using the word "sketch." But there is enough attention to the buildings here to suggest that her object in this case was to suggest rather than give details of the surrounding land.
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Bibliography
Cook Nimbra, Queensland, Australia. Art UK. Web. 31 August 2023.
North, Marianne. Recollections of a Happy Life: being the autobiography of Marianne North. Vol. II. London and New York, Macmillan, 1893. Internet Archive, from a copy of a book in the Wellcome Library. Web. 31 August 2023.
Created 31 August 2023