Tom Roberts: subtly superior

The Tom Roberts exhibition at the National Gallery serves as a reminder of the fine painter he was at his best.

Supplied Editorial

Tom Roberts is an outstanding figure in the history of Australian art, perhaps indeed, as has often been said, our greatest painter. There are few, if any, others before or since who can match his combination of talent, training, inspiration and ambition, and perhaps only Arthur Streeton in his own time and Russell Drysdale later have held the mirror up to the experience of our own country with comparable authority.

The first thing that strikes us in Anna Gray’s outstanding exhibition is what a very fine painter he is at his best, how subtle he can be. This is never more in evidence than in the beautiful little panels from the 9 x 5 exhibition of 1889, tiny oil sketches in which the lessons of realism, plein-airism and a tonal tradition assimilated from Whistler but deriving from Manet and ultimately from Velazquez, come together in a seemingly effortless synthesis, as in an exquisite little picture of a man running in the rain in Melbourne, where the moisture in the air and the damp on the pavement merge into a subdued luminous environment of soft blue-greys.

But there is also something that is not quite right, and which is apparent as soon as we walk through the exhibition as a whole. After so many achievements, Roberts’s trajectory ends in a seemingly inexplicable anticlimax. Most great artists continue to evolve into their old age and many, like Titian, Rembrandt or Monet, enjoy a late style that may be quieter than their heroic earlier work, but can also represent a greater maturation and serenity.

Instead, Roberts’s career appears to end in the doldrums. To some extent this is true of all the important figures of the Heidelberg School: Charles Conder went back to Europe, became ill and produced minor works until he died. Frederick McCubbin painted the quasi-academic summation of the movement in The Pioneer (1904) and then continued producing relatively minor pictures before and after his visit to ­Europe in 1911 — which did indeed result, in his case, in a minor version of a late style.

Streeton’s career also declined after he left Australia, but even if he never again painted pictures as defining of the Australian experience as those done between the mid-1880s and mid-1890s, he was among our best war artists and subsequently produced some fine late Australian pictures. But Roberts not only seems to lose his way in England, where he initially travelled to complete the huge picture commemorating the opening of federal parliament; even more strikingly, he seems not to find it again after returning to Australia in 1923. How could a painter of such vision and energy in the years before Federation suddenly have nothing to say in the new century?

Returning to our first impression, though, if we are slightly surprised by the refinement and subtlety of his art, it may be because we are used to thinking of Roberts as the painter of Shearing the Rams, a celebration of “strong masculine ­labour” and of the industry that was the foundation of the nation’s prosperity. We may unconsciously be imagining Roberts as a kind of official spokesman of Australian nationalism, like a state-funded social realist charged with expressing the collective identity of a nation about to be formed.

This is an example of the way we can misread history through a combination of simplification and hindsight. The Heidelberg painters did in fact, and to some extent consciously, contribute to the formation of an Australian consciousness in the years leading up to Federation. They did not begin with this intention, however. Nor were they responding to official commissions or significant patronage from the state or from private individuals; the absence, in fact, of any mature system of patronage meant that success for an artist was short-lived and vulnerable to economic vicissitudes such as the bank crash of 1893.

Roberts was born in England, came to Melbourne as a boy and began his training at the National Gallery School before travelling to London to continue his studies there. His academic training equipped him to paint figures, and at the same time he absorbed a number of ideas about the art of painting that were to be fundamental to his subsequent work.

One was the importance of plein-air painting, practised since the late 18th century, which had by the 1870s evolved into impressionism in France. Neither Roberts, however, nor the other Heidelberg painters were concerned with the same aspects of the ephemeral subjective experience as Monet. He was more directly inspired by mid-century realism, from which he also derived an interest in the theme of rural labour, overlaid with elements of decorative and quasi-abstract design learned from Whistler.

The exhibition includes works from these early years, but if we really want to understand Roberts’s starting-point as a mature artist, we should probably look at the beautiful little painting A Quiet Day on Darebin Creek, from shortly after his return to Australia in 1885. With an artist (probably his friend Louis Abrahams) seen from the back seated on the right, the picture has an autobiographical as well as a programmatic quality as a declaration of the value of painting from the motif.

What is really exceptional about this picture is the way that so much meaning is found in so humble a subject, and particularly in the still and glassy pond. Still water has been a natural metaphor for the serenity of the mind since antiquity, and as such has played an important part in landscape painting for centuries. At the same time, the glassy reflection recalls the myth of Narcissus, and Alberti, the greatest art theorist of the Renaissance, took Narcissus as an allegory of painting’s effort to capture the fleeting image on the surface of reality.

Roberts had probably not read Alberti, any more than Monet, whose late paintings of the reflections in his lily pond are the ultimate illustration of this insight. But an artist does not need to be aware of the theoretical articulation of such ideas to perceive them in an intuitive manner. Here, we can see what attracts him is above all the beautiful effect of light that occurs very early and very late in the day, when the low angle of the sun allows the still water to mirror the bank above it with miraculous clarity.

Roberts’s first instinct seems to have been to pursue the truth of nature, and this is the inspiration of the original artist camps outside Melbourne, immortalised in the famous painting of Abrahams and McCubbin cooking supper beside their tent (1886). There is a similar pleasure in being at one with the natural environment in The Sunny South (1887), in which the group of young plein-airists take a break from their outdoor sketching for a dip in Port Phillip Bay, their pleasure matched by the effortless harmony of figure and landscape.

It was natural to progress from the plein-air quest for a truthful account of Australia’s natural environment to a more general reflection on the national experience, not only because the movement towards Federation was under way, but because all previous Australian painters had also been concerned with the question of living in this continent, although the only one Roberts and his friends looked at carefully was Abram Louis Buvelot.

Roberts’s way to a reflection on nationhood, inspired by the realist painters in Europe, was through the theme of labour, and this is partly what makes Charcoal Burners (1886) so significant. This beautiful picture is in many ways much more successful than Shearing the Rams (1888-90) because it is more spontaneous and because the figures are so effectively integrated with the landscape. A couple of fine oil sketches show how carefully Roberts studied these figures from life in order to select attitudes that were spontaneous, true, and rhythmically composed in relation to each other.

The trouble with Shearing the Rams, for all its undeniable qualities, is that it is too self-conscious and earnest; one can’t help feeling that some of Roberts’s finer qualities as a painter have been sacrificed for the sake of producing an important national statement. And it is too unequivocally positive in its image of heroic rural labour, which raises its own problems: for these shearers are not independent selectors like the protagonists of Streeton’s Whelan on the Log or McCubbin’s The Pioneer; they are wage labourers who would go on strike in the year following the picture’s completion and successful exhibition.

Roberts’s natural tone seems to be more ­nuanced, if not pessimistic. The subject of A Break-away!, painted with far more spontaneity and verve, is a disaster: drought-parched sheep stampeding downhill to their deaths in a waterhole. The remarkable and strikingly ambivalent Bailed Up (1895-1927) seems to suspend all moral judgment and could not be more different from William Strutt’s interpretation of the bushranger theme that hangs in the corridor leading to the exhibition.

Still more ambiguous is In a Corner on the Macintyre (1895), in which we are struck by the unusual attitude of the horse but can easily miss the crouching figure of a man at a careless glance. In reproduction we are almost certain to miss another detail that is conspicuous in the real painting: a red and yellow mark at the meeting of the two diagonals of the composition, in the centre of the picture, which can only be interpreted as a hole made by a bullet.

This picture, painted at the same time as Bailed Up, thus turns out to even more radically ambiguous, with a suggestion of violent drama that is deliberately camouflaged and elusive, and forms a pointed contrast with the ostensible peace and tranquillity of the scene. The artist seems almost more interested in the strange triangular shape made by a pair of rocks on the waterline, and the reflection that turns it into a diamond — which inspired Boyd to find similar motifs on the Shoalhaven.

For here again we find the utterly quiet water and the early morning light that turns it into the mirror of the scene above, as the diamond makes clear. And here we have a glimpse of the kind of painter Roberts might have been had he not tried to make his fortune in England and exposed himself to years of depression and doubt before returning to an Australia in which he could not reclaim his rightful place, and which, between a rather staid established landscape tradition and an ultimately lightweight decorative modernism, seemed to have no place for an art that combined strength and subtlety in this unusual manner.

Tom Roberts

National Gallery of Australia. Until March 28.