Tom Roberts

Tom Roberts studied at National Gallery of Victoria Art School and The Thomas Hardye School. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are portrait. Places of work recorded in the authority are Melbourne. Works named in the authority record are A break away!, Bailed Up, Bourke Street, The Big Picture and Shearing the Rams. Work by Tom Roberts is recorded in the collections of National Gallery of Victoria, National Portrait Gallery, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Australia and Art Gallery of South Australia.

• Name — Tom Roberts • Birth Name — Thomas William Roberts • Birthplace — Dorchester, Dorset, England • Died — 14 September 1931 • Place of death — Kallista, Victoria, Australia • Resting Place — Illawarra churchyard, near Longford, Tasmania • Occupation — Artist Thomas William Roberts (8 March 185614 September 1931) was an English-born Australian artist and a key member of the Heidelberg School art movement, also known as Australian impressionism. After studying 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". That year, he joined Frederick McCubbin in founding the Box Hill artists' camp, the first of several plein air camps frequented by members of the Heidelberg School. Together with Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder, they staged the 1889 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition, Australia's first self-consciously avant-garde art exhibition. Nicknamed "Bulldog" due to his tenacity and drive, Roberts was considered the primary force behind the Heidelberg School movement. He encouraged other artists to capture the national life of Australia, and while he is best known today for his "national narratives"—among them Shearing the Rams (1890), A break away! (1891) and Bailed Up (1895)—he earned a living as a society portraitist, and was the first person to push for Australia to have its own National Portrait Gallery. In 1903, he completed the commissioned work The Big Picture, the most famous visual representation of the first Australian Parliament.

Roberts was born in Dorchester, Dorset, England, although some mystery surrounds his actual birthdate: his birth certificate says 8 March 1856, whereas his tombstone is inscribed 9 March. His father was Richard Roberts, a journalist, and his mother was Matilda Evans Roberts. He had two younger siblings. When his father died, Matilda migrated with her family to Australia in 1869 to live with relatives. Settling in Collingwood, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Roberts worked as a photographer's assistant through the 1870s, while studying art at night under Swiss-born landscape painter Louis Buvelot and befriending others who were to become prominent artists, notably Frederick McCubbin.

During this period, his mother had remarried to a man with whom Roberts did not get along. He 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 and future politician William Maloney, where he met Spanish artists Laureano Barrau and Ramon Casas, who introduced him to the principles of impressionism and plein air painting. While in London and Paris, he took in the progressing influence of painters Jules Bastien-Lepage and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

• Illustration — Residence in Hampstead Garden Suburb, designed for Roberts by Thomas Geoffry Lucas in 1910 In 1896, he married 36-year-old Elizabeth (Lillie) Williamson and they had a son, Caleb. Lillie Roberts was an expert maker of picture frames, and during the period 1903–1914, when Roberts painted relatively little, much of the family's income apparently came from Lillie's work. Roberts spent World War I in England assisting at a hospital. Back in Australia, he built a house at Kallista, near Melbourne. Elizabeth died in January 1928, and Roberts remarried, to Jean Boyes, in August 1928. He died in 1931 of cancer in Kallista. His ashes are buried in the churchyard at Illawarra near Longford, Tasmania, one of his favourite painting spots.

• Illustration — Roberts painting The Big Picture, 1903 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, commissioned for a fee of one thousand guineas plus expenses was a depiction of the first sitting of the Parliament of Australia in the Melbourne Exhibition Building and was an enormous work, notable for the event depicted as well as the quality of Roberts' work. • Illustration — The Big Picture, 1903, Parliament House, Canberra • Illustration — Shearing the Rams, 1890, National Gallery of Victoria Shearing the Rams was based on a visit to a sheep station at Brocklesby in southern New South Wales, depicted the wool industry that had been Australia's first export industry and a staple of rural life. When it was first exhibited, there were immediately calls for the painting to enter a public gallery, with a Melbourne correspondent for the Sydney press stating, "if our national gallery trustees were in the least patriotic, they would purchase it." Some critics did not feel that it fitted the definition of 'high art'. However, since the wool industry was Australia's greatest export industry at the time, it was a theme with which many Australian people could identify. In this painting, as one modern reviewer has said, Roberts put his formal art training to work, translating "the classical statuary into the brawny workers of the shearing shed". • Illustration — Holiday sketch at Coogee, 1888, Art Gallery of New South Wales 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). Many of Roberts' paintings were landscapes or ideas done on small canvases that he did very quickly, such as his show at the famous 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition in Melbourne, "9 by 5" referring to the size in inches of the cigar box lids on which most of the paintings were done. Roberts had more works on display in this exhibition than anyone else. • Illustration — Roberts earned a living primarily through portraiture (Pictured: Portrait of Florence, 1898). 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. While Conder painted Coogee Bay emphasising on the decorative qualities of form and colour, Roberts' Holiday sketch at Coogee(1888) embodies his primary focus on the landscape's natural effects. It is an early testament to Roberts' plein-air 'impressionist' technique, which brought out the sun's glare on the bright blue sea, bleached white sand, dry grass and spindly seaside vegetation.

A retrospective toured Australia in 1996–97 and another was shown at the National Gallery of Australia from December 2015 – March 2016. Roberts was one of four Australian artists whose paintings featured in the Australia’s Impressionists exhibition at the National Gallery, London, which ran from December 2016 to March 2017; it was described as 'the first UK exhibition of its kind'.

• Illustration — Coming South, 1886, National Gallery of Victoria • Illustration — Slumbering Sea, Mentone, 1887, National Gallery of Victoria • Illustration — An autumn morning, Milson's Point, Sydney, 1888, Art Gallery of New South Wales • Illustration — She-Oak and Sunlight, 1889, National Gallery of Victoria • Illustration — Lily Stirling, 1890, National Gallery of Victoria • Illustration — The old barracks at Collendina, 1891, National Gallery of Australia • Illustration — A break away!, 1891, Art Gallery of South Australia • Illustration — Aboriginal Head, Charlie Turner, 1892, Art Gallery of New South Wales • Illustration — The Golden Fleece, 1894, Art Gallery of New South Wales • Illustration — Mosman's Bay, 1894, New England Regional Art Museum • Illustration — Bailed Up, 1895, Art Gallery of New South Wales

Louise, daughter of the Hon.