Tom ROBERTS

English 1856–1931
emigrated to Australia 1869

During the summer of 1883, when the Royal Academy schools were in recess, Tom Roberts set off for Spain with some Australian friends, William Moloney from Melbourne, and the Russell brothers, John and ‘Percy’, from Sydney. The party moved quickly across the country, arriving in Granada early in September. It was here that Roberts had his famous meeting with two art students from Paris, Laureano Barrau and Ramon Carbo Casas. They reinforced for him the importance of direct oil sketching and enthused him for plein-air painting.

Picturesque subjects abounded in Granada and a great attraction nearby was the Alhambra Palace, that masterpiece of thirteenth-century Moorish architecture. Roberts at last had solid time to paint, albeit on a small scale, and a number of works inscribed ‘Granada’ survive from this happy sojourn. A Moorish doorway, 1883, is crisply realistic, earthy in palette and flooded with sunlight. It looks forward to those celebrations of Australian sunlight he was to paint in his second summer back in Melbourne: Slumbering sea, Mentone, 1887 (in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria), and The sunny South, c. 1887 (National Gallery of Victoria).

Terence Lane

The Heidelberg School generation saw Louis Buvelot as ‘the father of Australian landscape painting’. It was Buvelot who drew their attention to the fleeting effects of light, both seasonal and temporal, who celebrated the Australian bush in all its unclipped splendour, and whose looser technique offered an alternative to the polish of Eugène von Guérard. In Buvelot’s final years, as the beatification process got under way, artists and photographers sought to fix his image for posterity: he was memorably painted by Julian Ashton in 1880 (Geelong Art Gallery), drawn by Tom Roberts in 1886 (Art Gallery of New South Wales), and photographed by J. W. Lindt and others. When he died in 1888 there was a spate of posthumous portraits. Roberts’s etching, based on another drawing, now lost, of 1886, was presumably first printed around 1888. Early impressions are rare, and most date from the 1920s. Roger Butler has written:

These later impressions printed by [Jessie] Traill and [Cyril] Dillon reflect the prevailing soft, pictorialist fashion of the period. Printed in sepia with lush painterly plate tone, they are far removed in feeling from the simple printings in black ink favoured in the 1880s and ‘90s by Roberts.1

The plate is held by the National Gallery of Victoria.

Terence Lane