Golden summer, Eaglemont is an Australian idyll painted by Arthur Streeton during a summer of drought. He consciously created an epic work, large in scale and poetic in its approach to the local landscape. The 1888 centenary of European settlement generated an increased public interest in Australian history and the desire to find a particularly Australian culture.

Streeton first occupied the weatherboard farmhouse on the Mount Eagle estate at Heidelberg near Melbourne in 1888, the year before he painted this work. The area was part of the outer suburbs of Melbourne, not the bush, and was easily accessible by public transport. Tom Roberts, Charles Conder and others regularly painted there.

In Golden summer, Eaglemont Streeton captured a sense of leisured enjoyment. He shows the undulating plain on a warm sunny afternoon, with distant purple shadows fast creeping over the hills and lurking in little patches among the hollows of the ground. He based the image on a small outdoor landscape. He painted the foreground broadly, using shadows to lead the eye into the picture space, up to the gum trees silhouetted against the sky, conveying oneness with nature
and a feeling of wellbeing.