Heffner A Flitting Gleam before the Storm {1884} NGV [PA]

Heffner, Karl (1849-1925; German)
A Flitting Gleam before the Storm (c.1880)
Oil on canvas, 80.5 x 121.0 cm
Purchased, 1884
National Gallery of Victoria (p.310.4-1)

This was the first of Heffner’s moody landscapes to enter the Melbourne collection.

The combination of reflections and distant light in this work brings to mind Australian painter William Charles Piguenit’s masterly painting The Flood in the Darling, 1890 (Art Gallery of New South Wales; acquired in the year it was painted, 1895).

Refs.

AR 1884, p.35; NGV 1894, p.13 (I.La Trobe Gallery, no.12); NGV 1905, p.15 (I.La Trobe Gallery, no.25) [£500] 

For Piguenit (1836-1914) and The Flood in the Darling, see e.g. McDonald Art of Australia (2008), esp.pp.218-19, and Grishin Australian Art (2013), pp.106-7 (both with good reproductions)