Fern Tree Gully Dandenong Ranges Victoria

Melbourne: Hamel & Ferguson, 1867. Print. Very good overall. From Eugene von Guérard's Australian Landscapes 1866-68. Von Guerard is said to have painted the work "at the entrance to Dobson's Gully in the Dandenong's'. The area was the location where Thomas Dobson made his home and established a timber camp. He called it 'Lightwood Gully', the original name for Ferntree Gully.

"His remarkable image of a fern-tree gully in the Dandenong Ranges, some 40 kilometres east of Melbourne, conveys a sense of the landscape as a spiritual sanctuary... Painted on return to the artist's Melbourne studio, Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges is a work that combines von Guerard's meticulous observation of local plant species with his artiistic interest in compositional arrangement and the creation of a 'mood' particular to this environment. In this case we are privy to the magical world of a bower - an enclosed gully of natural foliage created by towering tree ferns. A pool of light on the forest floor leads us to two male lyrebirds cast in shadow, one withits characteristic tail feathers raised...: Tiom Bonyhady, Australian Colonial Paintings in the Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Australian National Gallery, 1986, p. 171.

Color lithograph, signed in the plate, with the oval blind stamp for the publisher Hamel & Ferguson below the title. Image incl. text 14 x 20 1/4" on paper 19 x 24 1/2". Archivally cleaned and backed, color tastefully enhanced.