Summary
Council purchased this painting of the landmark Edwardian baroque-style train station from the artist, Ernest Buckmaster (1897–1968), just two years before his death. It had been painted some four decades earlier and shows an idealised Melbourne streetscape, alive with the buzz and hum of street-level industry and the newfangled automobile, and presided over by the lofty cathedral to transportation and communication, which had opened less than two decades earlier, in 1910. In short, this painting, infused, as it is, with a warm golden light, might be seen as a homage to the city's early 20th-century modernity - a moment of historical transformation captured by the artist as he looked west along Flinders Street from outside St Paul's Cathedral.
Buckmaster trained under Bernard Hall and W.B. McInnes at the National Gallery Art School between 1918 and 1924, having first been apprenticed to a sign writer and amateur artist, James Beament, after being rejected for military service due to his frail health. Working in a realist style and exhibiting regularly, Buckmaster soon found an audience for his landscapes and floral still lifes, and he was also commissioned to undertake portraits. A defender of his own style and techniques, Buckmaster was a critic of modernism's rise in the world of art and he adhered to his conservative aesthetic. As World War II came to a close, he was commissioned as official war artist by the Australian War Memorial in 1945.
