Arthur Streeton, Nora Streeton (nee Clench) and Pat, the dog

Arthur Streeton (1867–1943), painter, grew up in Geelong and Melbourne and attended night classes at the National Gallery School between 1882 and 1887. In 1886, he met Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts, who admired his paintings and invited him to join one of their painting camps on the outskirts of Melbourne. With Roberts, McCubbin and Charles Conder, Streeton was a core member of the group of landscape artists known as the ‘Heidelberg School’. In 1889 he painted Golden Summer, Eaglemont and exhibited 40 works – mostly painted on cedar cigar-box lids – in the ‘9 x 5 Impressions’ exhibition in Melbourne. In 1897, after several years in Sydney, he moved to London with the photographer Walter Barnett and his wife. Streeton spent most of the next 25 years in Europe, working for some time as an official Australian war artist in France, and serving alongside Roberts and other expatriate Australians as a corporal in the Royal Army Medical Corps at the 3rd London General Hospital at Wandsworth. He married the Canadian violinist Nora Clench (1867–1938) in 1908. Some years later, Barnett photographed the couple at their St John’s Wood home in England. Some years after the end of the war, in 1923, the Streetons returned to Australia, settling near Melbourne.