Spring Frost
Elioth Gruner (1882 to 1939) · 1919
Early morning on a dairy farm: low sun streams through bare trees onto a paddock white with frost, throwing long blue shadows across the grass, while a small herd of cows and a farmer with a bucket move through the light. Mist rises where the sun touches the ground. The whole painting is about that moment when the cold of the night meets the warmth of the day, and you can almost feel the sting of the air.
Gruner painted it outdoors at Emu Plains at the foot of the Blue Mountains, going out before dawn day after day through the winter and spring of 1919. To finish so large a canvas in the open he built a shelter around it and wrapped his legs in chaff bags against the frost. Look at the foreground, where the frozen grass is painted in thick, broken strokes that catch the light like the frost itself, and then at the trees, drawn against the sun so that their edges glow. The composition is simple, a horizontal band of shadow, a band of light and the sky, and it has the clarity of a photograph taken into the sun.
The painting won the Wynne Prize for landscape in 1919, the second of Gruner's seven wins, and was given to the gallery in 1939 by F G White. It is often described as the most loved landscape in the collection, and its popularity has never faded; postcards of it have been sold here for a century. Gruner, born in New Zealand and raised in Sydney, painted light with a tenderness that few Australian artists have matched, and this is his masterpiece.
Did You Know? Gruner wrapped his legs in chaff bags to paint outdoors in the frost before dawn.
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