The sun is slowly setting and sends a warm glow over the grasses and wildflowers, lighting up the trunks of the white gums. A couple walk side by side through the wildflowers into the valley. There are pink tinges to the sky above the low-lying hills. And we can almost hear the chirp of birds in the great gum trees so typical of Australian landscapes painted in the first decades of the 20th century. This is Florence Fuller’s A Golden Hour, c. 1905, a painting portraying that magic hour at the end of the day. The place is the Darling Ranges in Western Australia, and the couple are John Winthrop Hackett, businessman, philanthropist and owner of the West Australian newspaper, and his new wife Deborah Vernon Hackett, née Drake-Brockman, who had married Hackett in 1905, aged 18, despite family disapproval. The painting may also be seen to represent their ‘golden hour’—Lady Hackett later became Lady Moulden of Adelaide and then, after marrying again, she was known as Dr Buller Murphy of Melbourne. On 31 October 1905, The Western Australian observed that this painting was undoubtedly the pièce de résistance of Fuller’s recent exhibition. The critic admired the balance of the composition as a whole, and the treatment of the hills and sky but most of all praised ‘the wonderful light effects’, ‘the golden glories of late afternoon’. (https://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail-LRG.cfm?IRN=223338)