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Eugene von Guérard’s place
Writer & curator
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Dr Ruth Pullin was guest curator and catalogue author of the National Gallery of Victoria’s exhibition Eugene von Guérard: nature revealed in 2011. Ruth is also a current State Library of Victoria Creative Fellow.
My Creative Fellowship project is based on the Library’s collection of Eugene von Guérard’s drawings, many of which depict the Ballarat goldfields in 1853. These have mostly been considered as historical documents for what they reveal about life on the goldfields, but I’m trying to redefine the way we look at them. Von Guérard was a great artist and it’s quite interesting to look at these drawings in terms of his first responses to the Australian landscape. He was very precise in the way he recorded mountains, rock formations and vegetation and he often identified the particular type of eucalypt he sketched. There’s one magnificent drawing of a single red gum that’s probably my favourite. His accuracy and precision is partly why there’s a renewed interest in his work.
The other part of my project involves von Guérard’s missing sketchbooks. He always carried little pocket-sized sketchbooks on his travels; they’re like a visual diary that spans his career and they give a wonderful insight into his way of thinking and working. About ten of these are missing but there’s a collection of tiny little drawings at the Library that I think have come from one of these missing sketchbooks and it may be possible to do a conceptual reconstruction.
During my Fellowship I’ve come to the Library every day. I often go into the dome before it opens to the public and stand alone for a few minutes, just to feel the soaring space above. It makes me feel very privileged to be here. Some days I do that in the morning and then come back into the dome at night. The dome has a completely different mood when it’s dark and the little green lights are on; it’s very atmospheric and enclosing.
When you look at the ‘ribbon of words’ around the dome, you get a sense of the great writers and thinkers in all disciplines who have come here over time. Von Guérard was a great user of the Library in the 1850s and ‘60s. He was very curious about things, interested in science and had lots of collecting passions. The first Librarian, Augustus Tulk, was a good friend of his. Then in the 1870s von Guérard became the inaugural curator of the National Gallery – which was on the Library site at that time. This sense of the Library as von Guérard’s place is very strong for me.
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