Sydney Harbour from Pyrmont

The English-born Jane Price had trained at the South Kensington School of art in London before arriving in Sydney in 1880 and settling in Melbourne in 1882. There, she shared a studio at Grosvenor Chambers in Collins Street with Jane Sutherland and Clara Southern. The three artists would become known as the main female painters of the so-called Heidelberg group of Australian impressionists during the 1880s. Price was also a close associate of Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin, and deeply admired their work. While sharing certain stylistic qualities with these contemporaries, Price’s works are also distinct. In 1890, Price had been a founding member of the Melbourne chapter of the Theosophical Society and in the years leading up to Federation, Price was committed to the ideas of a spiritually charged Australia, notions of which were expressed in her landscape painting. Price did not celebrate pastoral wealth in her landscapes but rather suggested transcendental notions of place.

In 1907 Price initially moved to Sydney, and after a period back in Melbourne during the First World War, returned there in the 1920s. She embarked on a series of panel paintings of Sydney Harbour and headlands. These small, poetic evocations are an under-acknowledged yet significant series of paintings of the city’s celebrated waterway. Painted at the hours of twilight or evening with electric lights dotted as glowing embers across the landforms, Price’s Harbour paintings reinforce the spiritual dimensions of place at a time of the city’s accelerated commercial expansion. '(Sydney Harbour from Pyrmont)' is a later work from this group. The harbour is bathed in the glow of the last hour of daylight, framed by a palette of golds, greens and blues. Price’s pulsating brushwork ignites the atmosphere, adding to the sense of the spiritual undercurrents of place.