Seeing one of William Strutt's familiar history paintings in the flesh is one thing, but seeing them alongside his painstaking sketches and studies gives a whole new appreciation of the work that went into creating the epic oil paintings.
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That's the hope of Matthew Jones the curator of Heroes and Villains the National Library's retrospective of the mid-19th century English painter.
The library has 200 Strutt works in its collection, many never before seen, but as most were preparatory works for his big paintings they asked other institutions to borrow the finished products.
The end result is a large exhibition featuring 50 works loaned from the State Library of Victoria, University of Melbourne, the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria "reunited" with 100 works from the library's collection giving visitors a behind-the-scenes glimpse of how the paintings were created.
Among the works on show are Strutt's iconic Black Thursday and Bushrangers paintings, exhibited together for the first time.
"For Strutt these kinds of paintings were a two to three year investment, it wasn't something you knocked up over a weekend," Jones said.
"You interviewed people, you went to the sites and took loose sketches, you read newspaper reports. Then in the studio you positioned people around to get the composition right and then you spent weeks and months sketching details."
Actor Jack Thompson came across the artist's work while preparing for his role as the Australian explorer Robert O'Hara Burke in the 1985 film Burke & Wills.
The film's arts' department used Strutt's illustrations from the explorer's ill-fated expedition as inspiration for the costumes.
"[Strutt] was in Melbourne when the expedition left, for its time it was like … people setting off for the moon or Mars, it was off into the totally unknown," he said after opening the exhibition on Tuesday.
"There's something romantic about art as a painting or drawing or sketch as opposed to a photograph.
"A photographer can record a moment … but only an artist can bring you what they perceive beyond the surface, a feeling that you have about someone."
Jones believes there is still an audience appetite for the traditional history paintings which show a different side of 19th century Australian art away from the trend towards landscapes.
"Strutt's different he's interested in big stories, big events and he wanted to bring them to large, heroic, grand canvases and people like big stories," he said.
"I think people will be surprised, I don't think people appreciate this kind of art was being done in Australia in the 19th century.
"When he studied at the Louvre he studied a lot of battle paintings and we didn't really have anything like that in Australia … so he used that composition for his big painting of Black Thursday [bushfire in 1851]."
Jones said Strutt carved out a "solid" but unremarkable career when he returned to England in 1862 just before the Australian art market was ready for his style of work.
"It's only now that we're dragging him out again," he said.
"Art historians have written about him relatively recently, hopefully he'll have a bit of a renaissance."
Heroes and Villains: Strutt's Australia is open at the National Library of Australia until November 15.
