Early painters of Australia included artists who recorded scientific and geographical information which were called topographical paintings. Professional artists on voyages of discovery from Great Britain (also known as the United Kingdom) recorded the coastlines and harbours, plants and animals, and local people of the new colony for official accounts; these painters were Thomas Watling, John Eyre, John Glover Conrad Martens and ST Gill. Most of the early Australian painters were amateur artists. The traditionally English aspects of these topographical paintings were, trees or rocks framing the picture, large exposure of the sky; bright lit up area in the centre and often a road leading into the painting.
Thomas Watling was the first trained artist of the colony. He was transported to Australia as a punishment for forgery. His large view of Sydney Cove in 1794 is possibly the oldest surviving Australian painting. The early Australian painters had been trained in Britain, and their response to the landscape was limited by techniques and pictorial formulas acquired there. His painting of "Sydney cove" portrays the early expansion of the bay of Sydney in detail. The composition is traditionally English because we see a road winding in the centre, the trees on either side framing the picture and look quite like the English elm trees more than Australian Fauna. The lit up area in the centre leads your eye into the painting and the large stretch of sky is conventionally English. The overall picture is very comprehensive and shows a good depiction of the early development at that time, from the buildings to the arrangement of the trees and streets. .
John Glover settled in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) in 1831 after a successful artistic career in Britain. Such European landscape masters of the late 1700's as Claude Lorraine, Salvator Rosa, and Gaspard Poussin influenced Glover in his work.
