Concrete Playground

Sydney Long’s iconic painting Pan has become so much a part of popular Australian culture that it’s hard to imagine the work being responded to as radical. Long’s contemporaries were the Heidelberg  School, painters who took to the fields and sat on hills, like the cliffs at Coogee, painting landscapes en plein air. Celebrated artists like Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton were invested in creating realistic representations of the Australian bush, capturing its unique light. Along comes Long; tendrilous trees drip into form while a reed-pipe toting satyr plays to his coterie of nymphs. This stylised, decorative form, which has been linked to Art Noveau and Impressionism, not only revolutionised Australian landscape painting, but earned Long his place in public collections such as the AGNSW. Pan hangs in this exhibition alongside other examples of Long’s work, such as By tranquil waters and Spirit of the plains, providing a rounded representation of the artist’s development as a landscape painter.


Image: Pan (1898); oil on canvas; 107.5x178.8cm; AGNSW collection.