Creating a national identity: Australia's Impressionist landscapes

Impressionism was embraced in Australia from the mid-1880s onwards, and was pivotal in forging a shared national identity at a time when six self-governing British colonies were heading towards independent nationhood. This essay examines the ways in which three of Australia's best-known painters, Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and Charles Conder, deployed the radical new tools of Impressionism to produce an art that they understood as being characteristically ‘Australian’