Godfrey Rivers: An alien in Australia
August 2001
R Godfrey Rivers made this painting in 1904 for the Queensland Art Society's annual exhibition. The work depicts an introduced 'flame of the forest' tree ('Butea monosperma', formally known as 'Butea frondosa'), which was planted in Brisbane's Botanic Gardens by Gardens' Superintendent, Walter Hill, in the 1860s.
It is easy to imagine that Rivers felt encouraged to produce a grand study of this exotic species after the enthusiastic response to his painting Under the jacaranda exhibited the previous year. This painting, however, was not so well received. A review published in The Queenslander stated:
. . . if [Rivers] had been content to take the tree and a small area of the trimly kept lawn, in the midst of which [the tree] throws its graceful shade, he would have produced a picture to which little exception could be taken, but the bandstand has also been introduced . . . The structure has a crowded look, and its presence detracts from the beauty of the picture.1
Rivers obviously took this criticism to heart. Some time after the painting was exhibited, he cut it down and reworked sections to remove all trace of the offending rotunda, changing the title from An alien in Queensland to An alien in Australia. This aspect of the painting's history was not known when the Godfrey Rivers Trust gifted the work to the Gallery in 1940.
In 1996, Joanna Strumpf wrote an honors thesis — 'Looking beyond biography: Interpretation of two works by Richard Godfrey Rivers' — in which she speculated that this painting and 'An alien in Queensland' were the same work.2 This was verified in June 2001 when Conservator Gillian Osmond examined the work using infrared reflectance and discovered remnants of the bandstand. She wrote: 'Rivers has cropped the left edge of the painting leaving only a corner of a tensioned canvas awning present at the centre left front surface of the work; this has then been painted over and adjacent shrubbery reworked'.
Samantha Littley is Curator, Australian Art at QAGOMA.
Endnote
- 'Queensland Art Society Annual Exhibition', The Queenslander, 22 October 1904, p.27.
- Joanna Strumpf, 'Looking beyond biography: Interpretation of two works by Richard Godfrey Rivers' [BA Honours thesis], University of Queensland, 1996.
