The hour of romance
Sydney LONG: artist
Painted in London, this evocative rendering of a twilight landscape harks back to Long’s celebrated Australian symbolist paintings from the 1890s. As the title indicates, Long’s concern was to convey the poetic by capturing the mood of a specific time of day, so that the real subject of "The hour of romance" is the expression of a feeling about the Australian landscape as a magical place of softened light. In this idealised view the moon is inescapably the centre of the painting and this, together with the low horizon line, the silhouetted trees, and the delicate broken brushwork, makes it clear that Long was captivated by the painterly challenge of capturing the atmospheric effects of moonlight on the scene. The restrained palette also reinforces the mood of reverie and connects the subject to the poet Dorothea Mackellar’s description of Australia in 1904 as an ‘opal hearted country’.
Title
The hour of romance
Artist/Maker and role
Sydney LONG: artist
Date
1914
Medium
oil on canvas
Measurements
76.5 x 102.0 cm (sight)
103.8 x 129.8 cm (framed)
103.8 x 129.8 cm (framed)
Credit line
Purchased 1975
The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia
Accession number
1975/0P18