Sydney artists' camps

Artists' camps flourished around Sydney Harbour in the 1880s and 1890s, mainly in the Mosman area making it "Australia's most painted suburb", but died out after the first decade of the twentieth century. They developed as a result of the enthusiasm for painting en plein air fostered by the Barbizon and Impressionist movements in France in the second half of the 19th century, and were modelled on the artists' colonies which grew up in France and parts of the British Isles. In them, free-spirited young men gathered to live cheaply together in the open air, trying to capture the beauty of their surroundings in paintings and drawings. Financial stringency during the depression of the 1890s made life in the camps even more attractive for Australian artists trying to establish themselves in a difficult market.

Some of the earliest camps, established before the spread of suburbia, were at Balmoral Beach. One centred on the weekender built by Bulletin cartoonist Livingston Hopkins "Hop" on land he leased near Edwards Beach, in north Balmoral. Among the artists who joined Hop at the camp was Julian Ashton, who, while teaching more formally at his school in the city, also encouraged his students to paint out-of-doors. A.J. Daplyn, another keen promoter of the new style of landscape painting, also stayed at the camp, as did many of the artists working for the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia (1886–89), including Albert Henry Fullwood, Frank P. Mahony, John Mather and Frederic Schell.

According to the custom of the time, women did not live in the camps. They were frequent visitors, however, and many women became enthusiastic landscape painters. Other notable visitors were writers Robert Louis Stevenson, who spent a night at Balmoral under canvas, and Ada Cambridge, who included lyrical descriptions of the camp in her 1891 novel A Marked Man and later, in her Thirty Years in Australia (1903). As she noted:

...
Wikipedia