ABRAM-LOUIS BUVELOT
Buvelot is credited as the father of Australian landscape painting with his response to the light and colonial countryside of Victoria, anticipating and influencing the impressionist painting of the Heidelberg School.
Buvelot was born in Switzerland and attended the Lausanne Academy (1830). In 1840 he travelled to Brazil, exhibiting regularly with the Rio Academy of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro, supported by the patronage of Dom Pedro II and working as a lithographer and photographer. He returned to Switzerland in 1855, and was employed as drawing master at La Chaux-de-Fonds, Neuchâtel, prior to immigrating to Melbourne in 1865.
Exhibiting in inter-colonial and Victorian exhibitions from 1866 to 1888, and receiving the endorsement of influential art critic for the Argus, James Smith, Buvelot quickly supplanted Eugene von Guérard as the colony’s leading landscape painter. Although not directly influenced by the traditions of the French Barbizon School, in 1855 Buvelot had worked close to a group of local impressionist painters while teaching at Neuchâtel, and their interest in ordinary rural life and atmospheric realism also typified Bulevot’s art.
His work is held in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
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