aAR’s editor looks at John McDonald’s ambitious undertaking — the first volume of a three-part series on the history of art in Australia.

An art historian’s position is quite different from that of an art critic — or an art connoisseur for that matter. Pinned to the art historian’s cerebral butterfly-board are specimens which are all quite dead; while on the critic’s board, they are very much alive and still fluttering. The connoisseur, on the other hand, is possibly looking out of the window for a hitherto unrecognised species, and will take off in hot pursuit of it. Or to find another analogy, the critic regularly partakes of the hundred-metre sprint, while the art historian undertakes the long-distance marathon — perhaps just once.

With volume one of his projected three-volume history of Australian art recently released, John McDonald joins the ranks of those writers who have previously embarked on the same journey: William Moore (in 1934), Professor Bernard Smith (1962), Robert Hughes (1970), Christopher Allen (1997) and Andrew Sayers (2001).

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Image: William Stadden Blake, A View of the Town of Sydney in the Colony of New South Wales, 1802, hand-coloured engraving and aquatint, 24 x 41.5cm. Art Gallery of South Australia.