CMAG's senior curator of visual art, Deborah Clark, says Capital and Country has been touring Australia since 2013 and is being shown for the first time in Canberra.

"It's a triumphal last gasp."

A. E. McDonald's Early Canberra, 1913 and Theodore Brooke Hansen's Landscape, Canberra, 1913 are in the collection of the Canberra Museum and Gallery and were not included in the original Capital and Country exhibition. They are now on show here along with the touring works Penleigh Boyd's The Federal Capital site, 1913 and W. Lister Lister's Federal Capital site, 1913. All four were entered in the competition announced in 1912 by the then Historic Memorials Committee to paint the proposed site of the federal capital.

The competition brief specified that entries be "of a panoramic nature and be correct in regard to the geological features of the landscape in every respect" with a "midday effect" being desired. Ten artists submitted works into the competition. It was won by Lister Lister with second place being secured by Boyd. Both their paintings were acquired by the Commonwealth and are in the collection of Parliament House.

Clark says the artists who entered the competition were not of the first rank even when their relatives were – for example, Penleigh Boyd was the uncle of the more renowned Arthur, and another entrant, Louis McCubbin, did not outshine the talent of his father, Frederick – and that perhaps the relatively modest prize money, £250, may have been a reason for the lack of truly distinguished participants. There was also the fact that some well-known artists like Arthur Streeton were overseas at the time.

While they may not be great paintings, she says, they do pique the interest and, viewed together, add up to more than the sum of their parts. They are of considerable historic as well as artistic interest, particularly to Canberrans.

"They all look west towards Reid and Ainslie," Clark says. Some included evidence of human activity – St John's Church, Reid, people, sheep – while others focused purely on the natural landscape.

"It's a really wonderful get-together of the four paintings – they look splendid, all panoramic," she says.

"If you're in the right position you can see all four."

These four competition entry works have not been exhibited together since they originally toured Australia with the other six competition works from 1913 to 1916. Clark notes that these dates correspond to the dates of the tour of this exhibition, which is finishing with four of the five competition works whose whereabouts are known being exhibited in Canberra (the fifth painting by "another man with a slightly absurd 19th-century name'', H. Septimus Power, is in the possession of a private club in Melbourne).

In addition to these four paintings there are 42 others that have toured the country in the exhibition, focusing on painting by Australian artists such as Hans Heysen, George Lambert, Streeton, Florence Fuller, Godfrey Rivers and Richard Hayley-Lever both at home and abroad during the Federation era.

It encompasses work done in Edwardian England and the final years Belle Epoque in France up to the outbreak of the First World War, as well as what artists were creating at home.

"It was a 'home and away' thing," Clark says,

Capital and Country: the Federation years 1900–1914 is on at Canberra Museum and Gallery from Saturday, November 21 to February 21, 2016.