Hans HEYSEN
Germany 1877 – Australia 1968
Australia from 1884; Europe, England 1899-1903

Mystic morn 1904
oil on canvas
122.8 (h) x 184.3 (w) cm
Elder Bequest Fund 1904, Art Gallery of South Australia

This wistful stand of eucalypt saplings in early morning light is a defining work in the art and life of Hans Heysen. A large four-by-six-feet canvas, it was exhibited in Sydney in 1904 at the Royal Art Society of New South Wales to astonishing public acclaim, thereby launching Heysen’s national career. It won the 1904 Wynne Prize for Australian landscape, judged by the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Later in 1904 it was included in Adelaide’s seventh Federal Exhibition and was bought by the Art Gallery of South Australia with £157 from the Elder Bequest Fund. Mystic Morn remains one of the Art gallery of South Australia’s best-loved landscapes.

It is an important transitional work in Heysen’s oeuvre. The low tonality recalls his immediately preceding European work, but the subject matter prefigures the heroic gum-tree subjects that were to follow. Eucalpyts became central to his art and eventually iconic to Australian popular culture.

Returning to Australia in 1903 after four years study in Europe, Heysen established a studio and school in Currie Street in the centre of Adelaide. Mystic Morn was painted in this city studio and was based on on-the-spot drawings made near Meadows in the Adelaide Hills. The way the artists handles paint conveys his delight in the distinctive qualities of the graceful saplings, especially their serpentine twisting forms, the texture of their crisp, peeling bark and the patterning effect of the open forest. Spatial depth and scale is suggested by the inclusion of two calves, who weave through the maze of tree trunks towards a small sunlit clearing.

One of several large experimental gum-tree subjects in oil from this early period, Mystic Morn, through its title, makes reference to poetic symbolist art. But the sinuous forms of art nouveau found in the young gums make them more abstract; they are decorative objects of beauty.

Yet Mystic Morn is more than mere decoration. Its sonorous, musical, vibrating linearities point to Heysen’s future meditations on the timeless and ‘spiritual’ qualities of eucalypts, Australia’s most beloved trees.

Tracey Lock-Weir

© Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2008
Andrews, Hans Heysen, exhibition book, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2008, p 50