Sydney Long: Spirit of the Plains 1897

In Spirit of the Plains 1897, Sydney Long introduced a mythological theme into Australian painting. The work evokes a distant, dreamlike and identifiably Australian landscape, featuring the brolga, a wetland bird found in northern Australia and well known for its elaborate mating dance.

Long’s depiction of the brolga’s delicate movements is one of the most rhythmical and haunting images in nineteenth-century Australian art. The artist used the flat, decorative shapes of the Art Nouveau style to link the flock of birds and the trees into one flat plane. He created a vision of Australia where birds and people appear united by music.

This joyous portrayal is in striking contrast to early scientific studies of birds, common in Australian painting at that time. Long wanted the Australian landscape to ‘free the imagination of the figure painter, employing soulful and graceful evocations of the spirit of the land, as did the Greeks and their beautiful myths’.¹

Endnote

1. Lois Hunter, The Australian Art Companion, Reed Books, Sydney, 1990, pp.90–1.

Feature image: A view of (l–r) Louis Buvelot's The Wannon Falls 1868 (Purchased 1973), Winifred Rumney's Barron Falls 1906 (Gift of the Agent-General for Queensland, London 1971) and Sydney Long's Spirit of the Plains 1897 (Gift of William Howard-Smith in memory of his grandfather, Ormond Charles Smith 1940), during a 'Words and Pictures' drawing workshop in the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Galleries, February 2018 / Photograph: B Wagner, QAGOMA