John Glover is possibly the most important landscape painter working outside Europe in the 1830s. He is without a doubt the finest Australian landscape painter of the early colonial period.  His heroes were Richard Wilson and especially Claude Lorrain.  He in fact earned the sobriquet, "the English Claude".

Although posthumously much overshadowed by his contemporaries J M W Turner and John Constable, Glover did enjoy a successful career in Regency Britain: as a fashionable drawing master, a prolific and popular exhibitor, President of the Society of Painters in Water Colours, gold medallist at the Paris Salon of 1814 and one of the founders of the Society of British Artists.

In 1831 he emigrated to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), eventually settling at Mills’ Plains on the Nile River, in the island colony’s mid-north. In a new land, a new light, he re-made his art: with sinuous blackwoods in place of sturdy oaks, Aborigines in place of classical shepherds, the dappled grey bush in place of the smooth green shade of European forest. Glover was the first artist to see and represent the precise differences between Australian and European landscape.

"John Glover and The Colonial Picturesque", a major exhibition of Glover's works is currently on display at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart (through February 2004).