A Corroboree in Van Diemen's Land

landscape

It was because of the monarch's known interest in the wider world that John Glover sent Louis-Philippe six of the pictures he had been painting in the British colony of Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), where he had moved to join his sons in 1831. Known earlier in London as a painter in the classical style of Claude, he had begun again, painting the exotic landscape and its people in a manner that is surely consciously naive, both in its extreme descriptive clarity and in the sinuous trees that seem exaggeratedly different from European forms. In one of the pictures chosen by the king, such trees arch over one of Glover's favourite subjects, the moonlight corroboree, when the Aboriginals danced at night, clutching green boughs.

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About the Artist

John Glover

1767 – 1849

English painter. He was employed first as a schoolteacher at Appleby (Cumbria) and after 1794 as a drawing-master at Lichfield (Staffs), from where he sent drawings to London each year; on his occasional visits to the capital he received lessons from William Payne and was clearly influenced by him. In the 1790s he also began to practise in oils, some of which were exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1795 onwards. At the first exhibition of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours (April-June 1805) Glover's pictures were priced more highly than those of any other exhibitor; he was elected President of the Society in 1807 and again in 1814-15. In 1820 he held the first of his one-man shows in London, and in 1824 helped set up the Society of British Artists. Glover undertook regular sketching trips in Britain, notably to North Wales and the Lake District, and from 1814 on the Continent. In 1831 he emigrated to Tasmania, using his substantial savings to set himself up as a sheep farmer. As a painter of large landscapes in oils he appeared to many contemporaries as the chief rival to J. M. W. Turner - much to the irritation of John Constable. In palette and composition Glover remained conservative; among his characteristic mannerisms was the use of a split brush to paint sun-dappled foliage.

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