If the back-flap biography did not proclaim John McDonald as ‘Australia’s premier arts commentator’, if the author himself did not describe The Art of Australia in the preface as ‘a massive work of synthesis intended to bring together the most recent scholarship’, and if it were not being puffed in advertisements as ‘destined to take its place as the definitive work on Australian art’, one might be inclined to take this book on its merits.

They are not insubstantial. McDonald covers a great deal of chronological and aesthetic territory confidently and competently. His style is bright and his narrative comprehensible. Occasionally he writes with great delicacy, as in observing how, in Arthur Streeton’s Cremorne pastoral, ‘tiny plants and wild flowers are distributed … with calligraphic flicks of the brush, their sharp verticals creating a counter balance to the massive, slow diagonal of the slope’, or characterising the faceted rocks in Tom Roberts’s In a corner on the McIntyre as ‘Cézannesque’. He has a nose for fascinating trivia, from the visit of England cricket captain Ivo Bligh to the artists’ camp at Box Hill, to Marion Ellis Rowan’s being the first Australian artist to have a facelift.