Weetangera, Canberra, Elioth Gruner
Elioth Gruner was born in New Zealand and arrived in Australia. He studied with Julian Ashton at the Art Society of New South Wales where he met the flamboyant George Lambert, an artist whose work would inspire Gruner. He died in Sydney in 1939, alone and destitute, a few weeks after the declaration of war between Great Britain and the Commonwealth and Germany.
Gruner was one of the most popular landscape artists working in Australia in the period from c.1910 to 1939. He was awarded the Wynne Prize for landscape at the Art Gallery of New South Wales no fewer than 7 times from 1916 to 1937.
'Weetangera, Canberra' was Gruner's seventh and last Wynne Prize award and also won the Society of Artists award for the best picture in their annual exhibition for 1937. Together with other works painted after his return from Europe in 1925, it follows a marked departure from the works of his earlier Emu Plains series (also on display) and shows his awareness of the concerns of modern painting.
