Tom Roberts

Thomas William Roberts (8 March, 1856 - 14 September, 1931), usually known simply as Tom, was a famous Australian artist and a key member of the Heidelberg School.

Life

The Big Picture, opening of the Parliament of Australia, 9 May 1901.

Born in Dorchester, Dorset, England, to a newspaper editor, Roberts emigrated with his family to Australia in 1869. Settling in Collingwood, a suburb of Melbourne, his first jobs were as a photographer's assistant which he performed through the 1870s while studying art at night, studying under Louis Buvelot and befriending others who were to become prominent artists, notably Frederick McCubbin. He returned to England for three years of full-time art study at the Royal Academy Schools from 1881 to 1884

Through the 1880s and 1890s he worked in Victoria, in his studio in Melbourne and at a number of artists' camps and visits around the colony. He married 35 year old Elizabeth (Lillie) Williamson in 1896, and they had a son, Caleb. Many of his most famous paintings come from this period. Williamson was an expert maker of painting frames, and during the period 1903-1914 where he painted relatively little, much of their income apparently came from this work.

He spent World War I in England assisting at a hospital, and spent additional time there in the period 1921-23. Upon his return, he built a house at Kallista, near Melbourne. This was a particularly productive and happy period in Roberts' life.

Elizabeth died in January 1928, and he remarried, to Jean Boyes, in August 1928. He died in 1931 of cancer at Kallista.

Shearing the Rams by Tom Roberts, 1890

Works

Roberts painted a considerable number of fine oil landscapes and portraits, some painted at artist camps with his friend McCubbin, but perhaps his most famous works were two large works, Shearing the Rams and The Big Picture.

Shearing the Rams, based on a visit to a sheep station (large farm) 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. At the time it was exhibited, it was criticised because many critics did not feel it fit the definition of 'high art'. However, since the wool industry was Australia's greatest export industry at the time, it was a theme which many Australian people could identify with. The painting showed a view of the shearing sheds which was not in some cases realistic. Shearing would probably have been much messier; for instance the shearer on the left has picked the ram up to move it, when normally it would have been dragged backwards.

Roberts loved this theme of the value of the work of ordinary Australian people. He made many other paintings showing country people working, with a similar image of the shearing sheds in The golden fleece, a drover racing after sheep breaking away from the flock in A Break Away!, and with men chopping trees in Woodsplitters. Many of Roberts' paintings were landscapes or ideas done on small canvases that he did very quickly, such as his exhibits to the famous 9 x 5 exhibition in Melbourne, 9 x 5 referring to the size in inches of the cigar box lids which most of the paintings were done on. Roberts had more works on display in this exhibition than anyone else. Many of the paintings had humorous touches and anecdotes, showing Tom Roberts' sense of humour.

"The Big Picture", a depiction of the first sitting of the Parliament of Australia was an enormous work, very notable for the event depicted as well as the quality of Roberts' work.

References

• http://www.artistsfootsteps.com/html/Artists_roberts.htm - source of most of the material for this article.
• http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/collection/australian/painting/r/apa00106.html - "Shearing the Rams" at the National Gallery of Victoria.