Not what you expect: the nineteenth-century European reception of Australian aboriginal art

In Aboriginal art studies it is generally assumed that nineteenth-century European writers had a very low opinion of the artistic abilities of indigenous Australians, an opinion reflecting the colonialist and evolutionist views of these early commentators. A closer look at nineteenth-century writings on indigenous Australian visual culture yields a far more complex and nuanced picture, with many authors expressing admiration for the artistic skill and particularly the draughtsmanship of Aboriginal people. In his end-of-the-century book The Beginnings of Art, the German scholar Ernst Grosse collected many such favourable evaluations and added his own, resulting in the presentation of indigenous Australians as an artful people who show much talent for vivid mimetic representation especially