John Glover

John Glover (Houghton-on-the-Hill, Leicestershire, 1767 – Deddington, Tasmania, 1849) was an English-born landscape painter who spent his later years in Australia and is often called the father of Australian landscape painting. In Britain he became famous for Italianate romantic landscapes, such as The Falls of Foyers on Loch Ness, and in England and France he came to be known as the English Claude, a comparison with the seventeenth-century French painter Claude Lorrain.

In 1831 he emigrated to Van Diemen's Land, now Tasmania, bringing a strong reputation as a landscape artist. After a short stay in Hobart, in 1832 he acquired one of the largest land grants in the colony at Mills Plains, where he named his property Patterdale after a place in the English Lake District.

His best-known contribution is his treatment of Australian sunlight: he painted the native bushland bright and clear, a clear break from the darker English garden tradition, and depicted the local trees and scrub more accurately. Works such as Natives on the Ouse River (1838) show Aboriginal people in the landscape, although it was painted after the genocide of Tasmania's Aboriginal people. His legacy endures through the John Glover Society and the Glover Prize for Tasmanian landscape painting.