Roberts painted landscapes, genre scenes and portraits with a nice, clean touch most of the time. To me, the archetypical Roberts painting combines fairly thinly painted backgrounds and more heavily painted subjects with areas done using a broad, flat brush. It seems that around 1910 he began using a more simplified palette. Unfortunately, I can't readily locate many of examples of this new direction. In any case, I find Roberts' body of work from the late 1880s and through the 1890s quite satisfying.
Painted during his student days.
Sailing to Australia.
This is the largest image I could find. I include it for readers interested in how artists work up paintings.
Yes, Roberts also portrayed men.
This was painted when Roberts was simplifying his palette.
The latest Roberts painting I turned up during a none-too-rigorous search.
Great images! The reason Tom Roberts' earlier paintings were more important was because he and the other Heidelberg artists were creating a brand new art era in Australia.
ReplyDeleteIn 1886 Tom Roberts joined Frederick McCubbin and Louis Abrahams, young men he had met while studying at the National Gallery of Victoria. They set up an artists' camp in the bush, showing the activities of ordinary rural labourers a la Barbizon school. Then Arthur Streeton, Walter Withers, Frederick McCubbin and Charles Conder joined them at the camps.
By 1900, all the heavy lifting in creating unique Australian art history had been done.