Artist of the day, June 22, 2020: Tom Roberts, an English-born Australian painter (#1027)

Thomas William "Tom" Roberts (1856 – 1931) was an English-born Australian artist and a key member of the Heidelberg School art movement, also known as Australian impressionism.

After attending art schools in Melbourne, he travelled to Europe in 1881 to further his training, and returned home in 1885, "primed with whatever was the latest in art". He did much to promote en plein air painting and encouraged other artists to capture the national life of Australia. While he is best known for his "national narratives"—among them Shearing the Rams (1890), A break away! (1891) and Bailed Up (1895)—he also achieved renown as a portraitist, and in 1903 completed The Big Picture, the most famous visual representation of the first Australian Parliament.

Roberts was born in Dorchester, Dorset, England and migrated with his family to Australia in 1869 to live with relatives. He worked as a photographer's assistant through the 1870s, while studying art at night. During this period, his mother had remarried to a man whom Roberts did not get on with. He hence decided to further his art studies, and returned to England for three years of full-time art study at the Royal Academy Schools from 1881 to 1884. He traveled in Spain in 1883 with Australian artist John Russell, where he met Spanish artists Laureano Barrau and Ramon Casas who introduced him to the principles of Impressionism and plein air painting.

From 1884 and through the 1890s Roberts worked again in Victoria. In 1885 he started painting and sketching excursions to what would later become outer suburbs, creating camps at Box Hill and Heidelberg, where he worked alongside McCubbin, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder.

In 1896 he married 36-year-old Elizabeth (Lillie) Williamson and they had a son, Caleb. Many of his most famous paintings come from this period. Roberts was an expert maker of picture frames, and during the period 1903–1914, when he painted relatively little, much of his income apparently came from this work. Roberts spent World War I in England assisting at a hospital. In Australia, he built a house at Kallista, near Melbourne.

Roberts painted a considerable number of fine oil landscapes and portraits, some painted at artist camps with his friend McCubbin. Perhaps the most famous in his time were two large paintings, Shearing the Rams, now displayed in the National Gallery of Victoria and The Big Picture, displayed in Parliament House, Canberra. The Big Picture, a depiction of the first sitting of the Parliament of Australia, was an enormous work, notable for the event depicted as well as the quality of Roberts' work.

Roberts made many other paintings showing country people working, with a similar image of the shearing sheds in The Golden Fleece (1894), a drover racing after sheep breaking away from the flock in A break away!, and with men chopping trees in Wood splitters (1886).

In 1888 Roberts met Conder in Sydney and they painted together at Coogee beach. The younger Conder found these painting expeditions influential and decided to follow Roberts to Melbourne later that year to join him and Streeton at their artists’ camp at Heidelberg.

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Mr Tom Roberts

Rejection, Self Portrait

1883,  Basking: a corner in the Alhambra

1883,  Still Life with Pomegranates

1883, Una Muchacha (A Girl)

1884, A Spanish Beauty

1884, Churchyard at Shillingstone

1884, Woman on a Balcony

1885, A quiet day on Darebin Creek

1885, Winter morning after rain, Gardiner's Creek

1886, Boat on Beach, Queenscliff

1886, Bourke Street

1886, Coming South

1886, Miss Minna Simpson

1886, The Artist's Camp

1888, Holiday sketch at Coogee

1889, Jealousy

1890, Lily Stirling

1890, Near Heidelberg

1890, Shearing the Rams

1891, A break away!

1891, Smike Streeton, age 24

1892, Aboriginal Head, Charlie Turner

1892, Eileen

1893, Lady with a Parasol

1894, Mosman's Bay

1894, On the Timbarra - Reek's and Allen's sluicing claim

1894, The Golden Fleece

1894-95, Edward Ogilvie

1895, In a corner on the Macintyre

1898, Portrait of Florence

1899, The camp, Sirius Cove

1910-12, Grey Lady (Mrs. Ince)

1927,  Hillside