The Queensland Art Gallery achieved a major coup in signing up the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American Impressionism and Realism show, which opened on May 30 and runs until September 20.
But the artist who would have made the exhibition particularly meaningful for Australians time is not represented in the exhibition at all.
The exhibition endeavours to link the impressionism of the two continents. Yet there is no work by (Lowell) Birge Harrison (1854-1929).
Birge Harrison was an American artist who was in Melbourne in the 1890s painting works very similar to those of Australian artist David Davies.
The disappearance of this body of work is one of the great mysteries of the saleroom.
Its auction 1891 was previewed in the press but as so often happens a post-sale follow up remains elusive.
The work has failed to resurface.
Other non-Australian works by Birge Harrison of around the same period, however, come up regularly at auction and are equally evocative.
The artist is also represented in many US art museums so it was not the work of an amateur.
He is generally considered to be one of the leading members of a group of gifted young American painters, among them John Singer Sargent and Abbott Thayer who studied in Paris in the 1870's and later helped to win serious recognition for American art in the eyes of the art world.
But none of his works are in the Met.
Therein lies the clue to his absence from the exhibition. The very expensive exhibition has loans from other institutions but the loans are of his Australian work.
A loan from the de Young Museum in San Francisco which in the 1990s acquired a major example of his work at this period would have added a new dimension to costs which the QAG was unable to share with other Australian art museums.
QAG is the only venue for the show.
The absence of other Americans or Americans-to-be like William Thomas Smedley, Hayley Lever, Martin Lewis and Louis Grier from the show is understandable. Their work does not relate directly to the movements under review.
But Harrison - judging by reviews of his work in Australia and in the US - should be.
Nearly 100 of his works priced at over $US500 have gone through the international salerooms over the last decade, but none in Australia.
Thirty Australian paintings feature in the QAG show, by artists such as Tom Roberts, Charles Conder, Frederick McCubbin and Rupert Bunny, alongside 70 lent by the Metropolitan.
Asked why Harrison was not included, the Met's curator Barbara Weinberg said, "Although we would of course always be interested in acquiring a fine painting by any important 19th-century American artist, this may have to wait, given the
current economic situation."
A pre-auction review of the contents of Harrison's Melbourne studio prior to his departure to the US in May 1891, suggests he produced a tantalising body of Australian work which appears to have been lost to posterity.
Later reports indicate that he produced more impressionist work overseas, becoming a member of a subsidiary impressionist group known as the tonalists.
The de Young Museum acquired Harrison's Frosty Morning near New Hope, Pennsylvania, a work in the spirit of another Australian impressionist, Elioth Gruner, privately in 1991.
Very much in the style of David Davies, Harrison's oil painting St Lawrence from the Citadel (Illustrated) sold at Sotheby's New York in 1987 for $US10,000.
The relevance Birge Harrison might have had to QAG's show is underlined by an 1891 review in the gossip magazine Table Talk which says that in Harrison's work Now for a Swim ``there is a suggestion of French influence in the clear colouring and the management of light and shade on the pinky grey beach''.
Gemmell and Tuckett was to sell the paintings on May 22. High Tide at Sandringham was described as one of the finest.
"The sun's last rays light up the waves with little ripples of red-gold, and complete a delightfully sof effect by imparting the same colour to the beach, The sky is in keeping with this and all throughout the picture the workmanship is that of a trained hand.
The companion work, Low Tide at Sandingham, presents the sea with a twilight effect.
"In this the noticeable point is the sense of motion which the artist has conveyed in the sheet of foamy water as it spreads over the sand.
"Evening on the Bay is a well chosen little subject, the scheme of grey-blue colouring being cleverly carried out.
The best picture was a view of a lonely bush road in the Western District, the Table Talk critic said.
"The last gleam of daylight is fading over a tract of dreary country, with nothing of interest to mark the landscape but a shepherd's hut from which red lights gleam , throwing into greater contrast the deep grey colouring of the scene."
The reviewer also discussed favourably the works of Mrs Birge Harrison. As the catalogue of the QAG exhibition points out (Lowell) Birge Harrison married Miss Eleanor Henderson, the daughter of Victoria's Western District pioneers.
The couple met while painting and sketching en plein air in the French countryside. They knew Charles Conder in Paris - he wrote enthusiastically about them to Tom Roberts particularly noting that works of Birge Harrison to be "impressionist after your own heart."
But the exhibition has left a lot of other Australian ties unremarked upon.
There are John Singer Sergent portraits but none done for the family of Sir George McCulloch, founder of BHP, for instance, again because it would have expanded the diversity of overseas sources.
Birge Harrison's work often turns up at international art and antique fairs as well as in the saleroom.
As always when exhibitions come about because an overseas art museums is renovating, the pictures that have come down from public view seem to have gone to the stacks and those from the stacks to Australia.
But there are some amazing loans which may have been possible because the economic scenario has bitten hard into US art museum's programmes and fewer blockbuster shows are being held.
This year is the 400th anniversary of the exploration of the Hudson River and anything related to the river is in big demand yet the Met has lent Up the Hudson by George Bellows and The Albany Boat by Gifford Beale.
