Artistically, the late 19th century was the great age of dreams and the imagination. Art Nouveau, so widespread at this time that it was known as ‘the modern style’, had been fashioned as a means of describing these worlds. Its forms were sourced from the organic movements of nature but extended as the entrails of inner life, suggesting the motions of the psyche and nature’s metaphysical rhythms.

Long’s Pan is the cumulative statement of his late-century, Art Nouveau practice. With its backdrop of gum tree arabesques, Pan presents a distinctly antipodean take on this decorative style. Through this aesthetic, the work signalled a shift in Australian painting when it was exhibited in 1898. It offered a modern vision of the landscape that strayed from the stronghold of naturalism and delved into an abstraction charged by a fin de siècle spirit of imagination.

Pan was Long’s aesthetic sequel to the shimmering symbolist landscape of The Spirit of the plains (cat 9). Together, these paintings established the artist’s attention to Art Nouveau stylisation as a means of creating an emotionally charged and mythologically enhanced Australian environment. Pan is suggestive of the local and international practices that Long gleaned to shape this artistic vision. The work hints at the poetic landscapes of his art teacher Julian Ashton, particularly Reflections 1892 (private collection) in which nymph-like nudes sit by a pond of reeds and waterlilies. Pan was also informed by Long’s association with the Sydney symbolist poet Christopher Brennan. Taking his cues from Stéphane Mallarmé, Brennan’s work had also delved into the landscape of Pan.

To this point, however, Pan was the painting in which Long appeared most intent on emulating the international practices that he studied in journals, principally the British magazine The Studio, which endorsed Art Nouveau as a style emerging from symbolist thought. When Pan was reproduced in The Studio in February 1899, it was figured as part of the global resurgence in depictions of nymphs, satyrs and Arcadian pastures as artistic subjects that filled the journal’s pages. Such works suggest the collective yearning for the myth of pastoral ideals, which underpinned an age that saw the unprecedented growth of cities, industry, scientific thought and material culture.

Long’s depiction in Pan of an antipodean Arcadiacan also be viewed as part of the rhetoric, which was common at the time of Federation, that described the fledgling modern Australian state as a contemporary Utopia and inheritor of the ideals of ancient Greece. Long, however, would later claim that he had based Pan not on any such nationalist sentiment but on the Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem of 1860 ‘A musical instrument’ (SMH, 23 July 1938). The poem describes Pan destroying the riverbed, trampling through it with his goat hooves to source reeds for the pipes with which he plays the music that restores order and poetry in the landscape. The metaphor is one of the artist altering the environment through a creative process. Consequently, Pan is a landscape of artistic transformation — an image not of the landscape itself but of the creative forces that shape it. With a palette evoking the magic hour of twilight, Long paints Pan as his music transposes the environment into a lyrical sweep of trees, whose rhythmic forms are echoed in the curves and crooks of dancing bodies. Long invokes the spirit of Mallarmé’s faun; the French symbolist poetic embodiment of bucolic liberty and erotic frisson that saw Pan and his pagan flock recur as emblems of the fin de siècle age and find, in Long’s work, a place in the Australian bush.

Pan was first exhibited in 1898 at the ‘Society of Artists exhibition’ (81) and reproduced with a drawing after the painting by George W. Lambert. It was purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1898 but, in 1902, it was returned to the artist in part exchange for Flamingoes (cat 18).

Denise Mimmocchi

Artistically, the late 19th century was the great age of dreams and the imagination. Art Nouveau, so widespread at this time that it was known as ‘the modern style’, had been fashioned as a means of describing these worlds. Its forms were sourced from the organic movements of nature but extended as the entrails of inner life, suggesting the motions of the psyche and nature’s metaphysical rhythms.

Long’s Pan is the cumulative statement of his late-century, Art Nouveau practice. With its backdrop of gum tree arabesques, Pan presents a distinctly antipodean take on this decorative style. Through this aesthetic, the work signalled a shift in Australian painting when it was exhibited in 1898. It offered a modern vision of the landscape that strayed from the stronghold of naturalism and delved into an abstraction charged by a fin de siècle spirit of imagination.

Pan was Long’s aesthetic sequel to the shimmering symbolist landscape of The Spirit of the plains (cat 9). Together, these paintings established the artist’s attention to Art Nouveau stylisation as a means of creating an emotionally charged and mythologically enhanced Australian environment. Pan is suggestive of the local and international practices that Long gleaned to shape this artistic vision. The work hints at the poetic landscapes of his art teacher Julian Ashton, particularly Reflections 1892 (private collection) in which nymph-like nudes sit by a pond of reeds and waterlilies. Pan was also informed by Long’s association with the Sydney symbolist poet Christopher Brennan. Taking his cues from Stéphane Mallarmé, Brennan’s work had also delved into the landscape of Pan.

To this point, however, Pan was the painting in which Long appeared most intent on emulating the international practices that he studied in journals, principally the British magazine The Studio, which endorsed Art Nouveau as a style emerging from symbolist thought. When Pan was reproduced in The Studio in February 1899, it was figured as part of the global resurgence in depictions of nymphs, satyrs and Arcadian pastures as artistic subjects that filled the journal’s pages. Such works suggest the collective yearning for the myth of pastoral ideals, which underpinned an age that saw the unprecedented growth of cities, industry, scientific thought and material culture.

Long’s depiction in Pan of an antipodean Arcadiacan also be viewed as part of the rhetoric, which was common at the time of Federation, that described the fledgling modern Australian state as a contemporary Utopia and inheritor of the ideals of ancient Greece. Long, however, would later claim that he had based Pan not on any such nationalist sentiment but on the Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem of 1860 ‘A musical instrument’ (SMH, 23 July 1938). The poem describes Pan destroying the riverbed, trampling through it with his goat hooves to source reeds for the pipes with which he plays the music that restores order and poetry in the landscape. The metaphor is one of the artist altering the environment through a creative process. Consequently, Pan is a landscape of artistic transformation — an image not of the landscape itself but of the creative forces that shape it. With a palette evoking the magic hour of twilight, Long paints Pan as his music transposes the environment into a lyrical sweep of trees, whose rhythmic forms are echoed in the curves and crooks of dancing bodies. Long invokes the spirit of Mallarmé’s faun; the French symbolist poetic embodiment of bucolic liberty and erotic frisson that saw Pan and his pagan flock recur as emblems of the fin de siècle age and find, in Long’s work, a place in the Australian bush.

Pan was first exhibited in 1898 at the ‘Society of Artists exhibition’ (81) and reproduced with a drawing after the painting by George W. Lambert. It was purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1898 but, in 1902, it was returned to the artist in part exchange for Flamingoes (cat 18).

Denise Mimmocchi