Every year in October and November, a mauve-blue mist settles over Brisbane’s suburbs when the jacarandas bloom. The most famous image of the jacaranda is R Godfrey Rivers’s painting Under the jacaranda, which has achieved enormous popularity since it was painted (and acquired by the Queensland Art Gallery) in 1903. It is thought that this jacaranda was the first planted in Australia. Accordingly, the jacarandas that proliferate in Brisbane's sub-tropical climate are probably its progeny.

In a similar manner, the paintings of jacarandas that have become such a popular and appealing subject for Brisbane artists can be seen as the progeny of Rivers’s painting. Vida Lahey frequently chose to depict this subject in works such as Spring time in Brisbane 1932 (private collection, Brisbane), but it was nowhere more popular than in the work of Charles Lancaster. He exhibited paintings with ‘jacaranda’ in the title in the annual exhibitions of the Queensland Art Society (Royal from 1927) in 1924, 1931, 1940, 1942, 1945, 1950, 1951, 1957 and 1958. The blooming jacaranda has continued to be a popular subject. Not one, however, approaches the scale of Rivers’s original.
 

Glenn R Cooke is former Research Curator (Queensland Heritage) at QAGOMA..