Printmaking has an extraordinarily rich tradition that stretches back centuries. While the earliest printed images were made in Europe in the fourteenth century, the beginnings of printmaking extend back another century to China.

Printed images proliferated throughout Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a popular and affordable means of disseminating artworks to the wider populace. The most accessible of artforms, printmaking enabled everyday families to decorate their homes with images of religious narrative scenes and landscape views.

First Impressions charts the origins of western landscape art through the Gallery’s outstanding collection of old master prints, spanning the period of the first ‘pure’ landscapes in the mid-sixteenth century to the rise of landscape art in Australia in the 1860s. Over the course of more than 300 years the genre of landscape art underwent enormous innovation and transformation, especially during the ‘Golden Age’ of Dutch art in the seventeenth century, and again during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in English and German art. Artists during this latter period, described as the ‘Age of Enlightenment’, often worked alongside explorers and scientists to advance our broader understanding of the world.

Beginning with Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s sensational etching Large Alpine Landscape, which dates to c.1555, First Impressions leads visitors on a journey through three centuries of landscape and figurative art in print, taking in works by artists such as Rembrandt, Jacob van Ruisdael and Giovanni Piranesi, on its way to the émigré artists Eugène von Guérard and Nicholas Chevalier, who were working in Australia in the 1860s. The exhibition is presented by region, enabling visitors to understand the unique advancements of each country during this long period, with Germany, France, England and The Netherlands featuring most prominently.

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