^
Born on 09 March 1856: Thomas
William “Tom” Roberts, English-born
Australian painter who died on 14 September 1931.
— A leader of the Heidelberg School and pioneer of plein-air Impressionism
in Australia, he has been described as ‘the father of Australian landscape
painting’. Having moved to Melbourne in 1869, he studied at the East Collingwood
and Carlton Schools of Design and the National Gallery of Victoria’s School
of Art (1874–1881) while working as a photographic assistant. He led sketching
expeditions with Frederick McCubbin and initiated student requests for reforms
at the school. Returning to England, he enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools,
London, on 06 December 1881, officially recommended by Edwin Long. In the
summer of 1883 he toured Spain with the painter John Peter Russell. He learnt
something of French Impressionism from Spanish art students Ramon Casas
and Loreano Barrau [1864–], and then followed the latter’s advice
to visit the Académie Julian in Paris.
He returned to Melbourne in 1885 and the
following year established the first summer camp at Box Hill with McCubbin
and Louis Abrahams [1852–1903], portrayed in his painting The Artists’
Camp (1886). According to the painter Arthur Streeton, it was Roberts’s
‘quick perception and expression of the principles of Impressionism in the
year 1886, from which sprang the first national school of painting in Australia’.
Charles Conder later wrote to Roberts, who was his teacher: ‘If there is
any distinct school in Melbourne (I wouldn’t say Sydney) it’s entirely due
to you’. His Heidelberg school nickname was ‘Bulldog’.
— LINKS
— A
Break Away! (1891, 137x168cm; 804x1000pix, 504 kb _ ZOOM
not recommended to 1990x2475pix, 2029kb) _ a horse-mounted shepherd waves
his hat in a vain attempt to stop a flock of sheep stampeding to freedom.
A mostly almost monochrome picture, where reddish-brown is the color even
of most of the tree leaves and other vegetation, and not much more than
the dark grayish blue sky is of a contrasting color.
— Winter
Morning after Rain, The Old Bridge, Gardiner's Creek
— Bourke
Street, Allegro Con Brio (35x45cm) — Slumbering
Sea, Mentone (1887, 51x76cm)
— A
Summer Morning Tiff (1886, 76x51cm) — The
Sculptor's Studio
— Bailed
Up (1927, 135x183cm) _ Tom Roberts was fascinated by pastoral life and
found his greatest fulfillment in a series of bush-life paintings begun
in 1888-90 with Shearing the rams and continued after his shift
in 1891 from Melbourne to Sydney. Whilst staying at Duncan Anderson's Newstead
sheep station, near Inverell in the New England tableland of northern New
South Wales, Roberts conceived the idea of a bushranging picture. In it
he would present an imaginary incident from the disorderly past, within
an artistically modern portrayal of the Australian landscape in its highest
key. Such was the beginning of Bailed up.
At Newstead at the end of 1893 Roberts was
already planning his second sheep-shearing painting, The Golden Fleece,
which he would complete during the following year. Walking along the road
between Newstead and Paradise, a neighboring station owned by Russell Hughes,
he found a setting for his bushranging picture. It was an isolated spot
among grass trees and a forest of tall gums, a level bend on a long steep
ascent, the last bad hill for travellers following the Macintyre River on
their way to Inverell. This back road was not in fact a coaching route,
but here was a good setting for Roberts's 'sham stick-up': a coach would
have been well and truly trapped by the great log placed across the narrow
climbing road; mounted bushrangers could have waited well camouflaged in
the steep forest above, and a spare horse left lurking in the shadows. It
was highland country, not far from where the region's last bushranger, 'Captain
Thunderbolt', had died a quarter of a century earlier.
At this ideal spot for a robbery under arms,
the artist, helped by the Anderson family, built a platform of timber, bark
and wire in a stringy-bark tree growing below the road, so that he could
set up his canvas on this 'Perch' at the level of the road. A Cobb & Co.
coach then in operation between Inverell and Glen Innes was painted in town
at Inverell, together with its driver Bob Bates. 'Silent Bob Bates' had
a story of being robbed by Thunderbolt some three decades earlier, and it
was his laconic, hard-wrung description of the quiet nature of the incident
which determined the mood of Roberts's composition. Other characters were
modelled by other townspeople in Inverell, and by station hands at Newstead,
where the painting was completed. Roberts made tiny drawings and an oil
sketch of how he wanted the scene to look before he started his big canvas,
in which he set out to create the most complex painting of his career to
date; complex because it was not only about the seizing of a moment in the
landscape but was also intended to convey a recollection of the historical
past. This particular place had engendered the artist's idea of a sudden,
apparitional haunting by bushrangers.
Of the group of bush masterpieces that Roberts
embarked upon between 1888 and 1898, Bailed up turned out to be the most
contentious. For in spite of the nationalistic fervour which might have
guaranteed an enthusiastic reception for the painting when it was exhibited
in Sydney and Melbourne in the 1890s, it neither succeeded in eliciting
unanimous praise, nor found a willing buyer. Roberts dropped the price from
£275 to 70 guineas in 1900. After all the enthusiasm and trouble he took
to paint Bailed up, Roberts could not dispatch it into the world.
Because Roberts reworked the painting in
1927 it is now difficult to assess the validity of its reception in 1895.
Nagging criticisms made by the press concerned the way the legs of the men,
or the skin of the horses had been depicted, for example. Perhaps unsatisfactory
pictorial resolution was sensed, turning potential collectors away. Eventually
in 1928, after Roberts had substantially repainted the background landscape,
Bailed up, price 500 guineas, was sold from an exhibition of his
work in Sydney.
Critical opinion about Bailed up
has fluctuated. Lionel Lindsay wrote warmly of it in the Macquarie Galleries
exhibition catalogue, praising its rich rendering of light and comparing
its subject to the prose of Henry Lawson. But more recently, in his biography
of Roberts, Humphrey McQueen ventured the opinion that Bailed up
was ineffectual as a bushranging story and that, because of its flat, almost
skyless landscape and lateral disposition of figures across the composition,
it was an insipid echo of the then-fashionable, decorative, Symbolist
mural style of Puvis
de Chavannes. This ambiguity about Bailed up as an icon of
Australian art is puzzling. Why is admiration of it so tempered with caution?
Is it because, notwithstanding the monumental failure of his vast Opening
of the First Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, his Bailed
up represents the most protracted struggle in Roberts's career to realise
his vision on a large scale?
Answers to these questions may be hinted
at by comparing Bailed up with its family of bush-life paintings.
Others of the family might have had a more instant appeal. The motif of
A break away!, for example, has the impact of an action shot filmed
by a swooping helicopter. A rider tries desperately to stop a mob of sheep
stampeding down to a water-hole. Suspended in heat and dust, the powerful
dynamic of this composition can be read from far away. Small wonder that
when Bailed up was first exhibited in 1895 the press preferred
Frank Mahony's bustling Australian paintings of Americanized 'cowboys' and
'outlaws', such as the cattlepiece Rounding up a straggler (1889),
and the mounted pursuit of bushrangers As in the Days of Old (1892),
both of which Roberts would have seen hanging in the collection of the Art
Gallery of New South Wales. Against such action-packed pictures, the static
solemnity of Bailed up seems to have worked against its general
appeal; perceived perhaps as rather laid-back but artificial tableau. Yet,
by considering the deceptive ease of its mood, and with a patient examination
of its detail, we may appreciate Bailed up as one of his greatest achievements.
The composition has been cunningly constructed
with diagonals and verticals leading the eye up to, around and beyond the
dramatis personae. The landscape rises to the very top of the picture —
no sky as such, and no space for escape — and the gaze soon descends
once more to the lower half, forced to contain itself within the flat parameters
of the picture. Scanning the surface further brings forth the real richness
of the work since, as much as Bailed up may be about armed robbery,
or landscape, or historical mythology, it is equally about the transforming
process of painting.
Roberts's enormous struggle with Bailed
up enabled him to arrive at a majestic synthesis. Light became paint,
and paint became light and we cannot tell the difference between the two,
whether it is in the radiance of the shirts and hats of the figures, or
the straw-colored grass and silvery tree-trunks of the midsummer landscape.
Day after day Roberts walked three kilometers uphill on the road from Paradise,
where he stayed because it was closer than Newstead, climbed up a ladder
to the 'Perch', and stared at the hot stillness he was setting down on his
canvas which had been wired to a railing. This sense he transferred to the
coach scene itself, investing the figures with an almost mystical calm.
Indeed he created the feeling that time had stopped in the small, transient
affairs of humankind, as an all-pervading, all-redeeming, saturating light
became the most important subject of the work. The idea that we are observing
a kind of fairytale incident, strangely remote from yet hypnotised by it,
was carried even more tellingly into Roberts's companion bushranging picture
In a corner on the Macintrye, painted about the same time. But
nowhere in the entire history of Australian painting has such a quality
been better rendered than in Bailed up, where the mystery of light, human
incident, and experience of the Australian bush are combined with spellbinding
orchestration.
The remaining question which tantalizes is
a technical one, and concerns the extent to which Roberts repainted Bailed
up in 1927. The surface of the painting — scraped, reworked, impasted,
glazed, restated — is like a fossilised ocean bed, and traversing its
bumps, dents and crevices with the naked eye does not easily expose what
is old or new; only the impression of an impenetrable embodiment of the
painting's own history. Roberts inscribed two dates on the painting —
1895 and 1927 — and said that he reworked it extensively in 1927 in
his current manner. This was at a period when he had become much more a
meditative artist than a descriptive one, and thus of profound interest
to certain later painters of Australian landscape. And that, in the end,
is the telling factor which may distinguish Bailed up from the period of
its conception. For although he was no Poussin,
nor even a Puvis, he had an astute intuition for the grid. In other words,
at his best, he could orchestrate with genius all the aspects of a painting,
be they naturalistic or abstract, into the modern values of a flat surface.
In this way Bailed up straddles two worlds. It began as an idea
for an historical narrative of the nineteenth century, but finished, through
Roberts's difficulties, as a scaffolding by which he could be in grand scale
a painter for the twentieth.
— Louis
Buvelot (1886 drawing, 28x22cm) _ Tom Robert's portrait of venerable
artistic elder Louis
Buvelot, is one of the most sensitive portrayals of an Australian artist
made by a fellow artist. Buvelot is presented with a quiet dignity that
underlines the respect and admiration that he inspired in the generation
of artists that followed him and upon whom his work had such influence.
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