S.T. Gill & his audiences

Canberra, ACT ; [Melbourne] : National Library of Australia Publishing in Association with the State Library of Victoria, 2015. Quarto, illustrated cloth, pp. 255, illustrated, light handling marks, but a fine copy.

‘Samuel Thomas Gill, or STG as he was universally known, was Australia’s most significant and popular artist of the mid-nineteenth century. For his contemporaries he epitomised ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ basking in the glow of the gold rushes. He worked in South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales and left some of the most memorable images of urban and rural life in colonial Australia. A passionate defender of Indigenous Australians and of the environment, Gill in his art celebrated the emerging quintessential Australian character. This is the first major comprehensive book to be devoted to Gill and presents a radical reassessment of one of the most important figures in Australian colonial art and reproduces, in some instances for the first time, some of the most startling images from nineteenth-century Australian art. Published in conjunction with an exhibition entitled “Australian sketchbook: colonial life and the art of S T Gill ” held at the State Library of Victoria, 17 July – 25 October 2015.’ – the publisher