S.T. Gill & His Audiences

Book excerpt: 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. There will be an exhibition of S.T. Gill’s work at the State Library of Victoria in July 2015 and at the National Library of Australia in June 2016, plus smaller shows in regional Victorian galleries. In association with the State Library of Victoria.