oil on canvas
Signed ‘J. Will. Ashton, St Ives’ lower right
61 x 92cm
“Ashton was the son of a drawing master of the York School of Art who settled
in Adelaide two years after his son was born. He was educated at the Prince Alfred
College, Adelaide, where his father had secured a post as a teacher of drawing.
After leaving the College in 1897, he entered his father’s studio for four
years and was then sent abroad by his parents to study at St Ives under Julius
Olsson and Algernon Talmage. There Ashton developed a liking for marine subjects
rendered in free, vigorous impasto in an impressionist manner. From St Ives he
went to the Académie Julian to work under Marcel André Baschet
and François Schommer. In 1905, after exhibiting with the Cornish painters
in London, and in the provinces, he returned to Australia, holding his first
Australian exhibition in 1906.
Ashton was a robust, uncomplicated, out-of-door landscape painter with
a firm masculine touch. His paintings, often of spots hallowed by tourists
are picturesquely
set down with a firm grasp upon fact and atmospheric colour. His popular and
picturesque impressionism became quite a vogue in Australia during the years
between the wars when avant-garde painting was regarded by most collectors with
the deepest suspicion. Ashton was an art adviser to the Commonwealth Government
and a Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales between 1937 and 1944”.
REFERENCE
Bernard Smith, Australian Painting 1788-1990, Oxford University Press Australia,
South Melbourne, 1991, page 163
