The boat floated on an even keel;
she opened her eyes and found
herself in Wonderland.

Here was a deeper twilight, and all sorts of trees lent their foliage to make the shade. The artu with its delicately diamonded trunk, the great bread-fruit tall as a beech, and shadowy as a cave, the aoa, and the eternal cocoa-nut palm all grew here like brothers. Great ropes of wild vine twined like the snake of the laocoon from tree to tree …
(De Vere Stacpoole, The blue lagoon,
T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1908)

The Irish author Henry De Vere Stacpoole’s romantic trilogy, which began in 1908 with The blue lagoon, was most likely the inspiration for the title of this intimate scene. The three diminutive figures could be Stacpoole’s central protagonists Paddy, Emmeline and Dick who, having survived their shipwreck, arrive by dinghy in their South Pacific paradise.

The setting for this vigorously painted scene is Long’s lakeside camp at coastal Narrabeen, about 24 kilometres from Sydney, where he had a caravan and a boatshed with a rowing boat. In 1927 in this familiar and peaceful ‘wonderland’, Long was able to briefly revisit the vigour and surety of his 1890s brushwork to create one of the most outstanding paintings of his later years.

The blue lagoon’s compositional drama and lyrical qualities were widely noted when the painting was included in Long’s first solo exhibition in Adelaide in June 1927. On 21 June 1927, two days in advance of the exhibition’s public opening, the Art Gallery of South Australia’s curator, Leslie Wilkie, reported to his fine arts committee that he had ‘much pleasure’ in recommending the purchase of The blue lagoon (Sydney Long papers, AGSA Research Library). At the official opening, the literary scholar Sir ArchibaldStrong singled out this painting, pronouncing that in The blue lagoon ‘there was a certain element of poetry which appealed to him very greatly’ (Mail, Adelaide, 25 June 1927).

Tracey Lock-Weir

The boat floated on an even keel;
she opened her eyes and found
herself in Wonderland.

Here was a deeper twilight, and all sorts of trees lent their foliage to make the shade. The artu with its delicately diamonded trunk, the great bread-fruit tall as a beech, and shadowy as a cave, the aoa, and the eternal cocoa-nut palm all grew here like brothers. Great ropes of wild vine twined like the snake of the laocoon from tree to tree …
(De Vere Stacpoole, The blue lagoon,
T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1908)

The Irish author Henry De Vere Stacpoole’s romantic trilogy, which began in 1908 with The blue lagoon, was most likely the inspiration for the title of this intimate scene. The three diminutive figures could be Stacpoole’s central protagonists Paddy, Emmeline and Dick who, having survived their shipwreck, arrive by dinghy in their South Pacific paradise.

The setting for this vigorously painted scene is Long’s lakeside camp at coastal Narrabeen, about 24 kilometres from Sydney, where he had a caravan and a boatshed with a rowing boat. In 1927 in this familiar and peaceful ‘wonderland’, Long was able to briefly revisit the vigour and surety of his 1890s brushwork to create one of the most outstanding paintings of his later years.

The blue lagoon’s compositional drama and lyrical qualities were widely noted when the painting was included in Long’s first solo exhibition in Adelaide in June 1927. On 21 June 1927, two days in advance of the exhibition’s public opening, the Art Gallery of South Australia’s curator, Leslie Wilkie, reported to his fine arts committee that he had ‘much pleasure’ in recommending the purchase of The blue lagoon (Sydney Long papers, AGSA Research Library). At the official opening, the literary scholar Sir ArchibaldStrong singled out this painting, pronouncing that in The blue lagoon ‘there was a certain element of poetry which appealed to him very greatly’ (Mail, Adelaide, 25 June 1927).

Tracey Lock-Weir