McCubbin's failed gold prospector (Down on his Luck, 1889) sits mournfully in a Wedgwood paradise (after Claude Lorraine, 1650's), its broken porcelain traced with veins of gold (kintsugi).

Lorraine here depicts an idealised urban landscape, a pre-Romantic image of utopia and one senses that McCubbin’s miner has realised that his dream of creating Australia in this image is not only futile but was perhaps the wrong dream all along.

Blue Claude is a work about the squandering of Australia’s mining boom, both then and now and about how we choose to commemorate history within our domestic lives.