John Glover (1767 - 1849)

RA Collection: People and Organisations

English-born artist who in later life migrated to Australia and became a pastoralist during the early colonial period. He became known in both England and France as the “English Claude” and has been dubbed “the father of Australian landscape painting”

Glover exhibited watercolours at the Royal Academy between 1796-1804, before becoming a foundation member of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours in November 1804. In 1807 he was elected as its president. When the society split in 1812 on the question of including oil paintings in its exhibitions, Glover who also painted in oils, became a member of the reconstructed Society of Painters in Oils and Water-colours. He had begun exhibiting large oil paintings at the British Institution in 1810 and continued until 1827. He subsequently resigned from the Society of Painters in Oils and Water-Colours in 1817 in the hope of possible election to the RA. In 1823 he became a foundation member of the Society of British Artists, was its president in 1826; exhibited with it until 1830 and remained a member until his death.

Glover decided to move to Australia, arriving in Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) in 1831. In 1832 he acquired one of the largest grants of land in Van Diemen’s Land at the time at Mills Plains, Deddington. He named his new property Patterdale after Blowick Farm, a property near Patterdale, at the foot of Ullswater in the Lake District.

He adapted his picturesque style and luminous technique to his new surrounds, creating naturalistic and atmospheric paintings of Australian nature, settler life and Aboriginal culture.

John Glover’s eldest son, John Richardson Glover (1790-1868), (also known as John Glover Junior), was also an artist who travelled with his father to Tasmania. A skilled watercolourist, Glover Jr’s drawings were for many years confused with those of his father, largely due to his having made in later life numerous close copies from landscape views in Glover Sr’s sketchbooks. His brothers William (1791-1870), Henry (b.1803) and James (b.1805), also painted.