We had our last major Strutt retrospective about 35 years ago. This new exhibition, curated by Matthew Jones from the National Library, is our most recent attempt to make sense of the Strutt legacy. It is a big show, with about 150 items, which brings together all of the big pictures, including Black Thursday February 6, 1851 (painted in 1864), Bushrangers, Victoria, Australia 1852 (painted 1887) and The Burial of Burke, painted in 1911, accompanied with their numerous studies, sketches and photographs. As well as the academic history paintings, we have also many of Strutt's academic portraits, the bread and butter of his trade, where those of the Fawkners are among the most accomplished and that of Robert O'Hara among the least convincing.

William Strutt arrived in Melbourne on July 9, 1850, as a 25-year-old academically trained painter. He came in search of adventure, rather than in search of gold as had many artists of his generation who arrived a year or two later, and shortly after his arrival, he witnessed the separation and independence of Victoria (the colony of Port Phillip) from New South Wales and then the horrific Black Thursday bushfires in Victoria on February 6, 1851.

Once the discovery of gold had been announced, life in Melbourne was transformed, and despite his determination to stick to his trade, by February 1852 Strutt was on the Victorian goldfields. After only a few days of back-breaking work as a miner, he reverted to sketching.

Strutt noted in his journal, "Here, indeed, was an extraordinary sight. A piece of ground about two or three acres in extent sloping down gently towards a moderate-sized creek was perfectly honeycombed with holes, some just beginning to be dug, but in most of them the diggers were deep down below getting out the auriferous soil, which others were hauling up in buckets to carry in barrows to the cradles, where this washing stuff, as it was called, was most thoroughly washed at the side of the creek by being rocked to and fro in the sieve, [and that] which falls through to be collected from the bottom of the cradle. The creek was lined as thick as it could be packed. Every claim holder had a right to a space in front of the running stream where his cradle stood ... The whole field of operations reminded one of a huge ant hill, just disturbed, with the distressed insects hurrying about hither and thither to set things in order once more."

Portraits and miscellanea kept Strutt almost economically viable in Australia, but there is a note of bitterness perceptible in his letter to the critic James Smith, written prior to his departure for England: "It is lamentable to see men of true genius wasting their powers on little twaddling 'sujets de genre' when the pages of history offer such an abundance of splendid subjects."

Smith empathised and noted in his article in Argus that the colony was losing "a man of sterling quality and unaffected worth, and an artist whose abilities have been scantily rewarded and imperfectly appreciated in Australia".

Strutt's greatest masterpiece was his huge and ambitious Black Thursday, which was painted over almost three years, after the artist's return to England, and was first exhibited in London in 1864. Measuring over three metres in length, it is a melodramatic history painting executed in the best neo-classical manner with a minutia of precisely observed detail, much of it based on sketches Strutt had executed after the bushfire, and which are included in this exhibition, combined with a number of well established compositional strategies of history painting.

Strutt observed in his journal: "The terrified squatters and settlers hastily made their escape, leaving everything. The sick, put into drays, were hurried off; it was now a stampede for life, as represented in my picture."

Strutt may have been "the first artist in Australia to paint large pictures of typical subjects", as the early art historian William Moore noted, but the paintings found little resonance with Australian colonial audiences and Black Thursday remained in the artist's studio for almost 20 years; it was only in 1883 that an Adelaide dealer acquired the work at a much discounted price, and it was not until 1954 that it entered a public collection, that of the Public Library of Victoria, as the State Library of Victoria was formerly known.

Revisiting Strutt, we are reminded that he was a very accomplished draughtsman, a restrained and somewhat timid colourist, and an artist for whom a sense of archaeological precision had precedence over creative invention. He may have been the finest academic artist to have worked in Australia in the mid-19th century, but for all of its theatrical strategies and Victorian sentimentalism, his was not an art which rang true to the Australian experience.

I always think of Black Thursday and The Burial of Burke, like illustrations to a sermon. Beautifully executed, accurately observed, but in the end lacking in the sense of authenticity that Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin were to bring to their history painting in the following generation.

Heroes and Villains: Strutt's Australia. National Library of Australia. August 12-November 15, daily 10am-5pm.