Tom Roberts

Canberra : National Gallery of Australia, 2015. Quarto, illustrated boards, pp. 320, illustrated. A very good second hand copy, the text block slightly loose, of the catalogue from this landmark exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia. This book is now out of print. School edition, the front free endpaper with a printed message from the Australian Prime Minister announcing that a copy of this publication was provided to every school library in Australia. Loosely enclosed : Secondary Education Resource booklet (20 pages).

“This publication accompanies the exhibition Tom Roberts at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and discusses Tom Roberts’s life and work and provides details on individual iconic works by Roberts from around Australia. The essays explore among other things Roberts relations with other artists, in particular McCubbin and Streeton who had very different places in his life and art. They also look at the seminal influence of Whistler, Manet and Velasquez on his work – as well as artists such as Bastien Lepage and Courbet. They also look at his preference for pink tones in his early work and pastel blue and green in his later work. Importantly, this publication includes Roberts’s highly popular national narratives such as Shearing the rams 1888-90, A break away! 1891, The golden fleece 1894 and Bailed up 1895. It includes eight of Roberts’s panel portraits, ‘Familiar faces and figures’ from the late 1890s. And shows Roberts’s mastery of the art of pastel portraiture with a group of his pastels from this period. The publication also features Tom Roberts’s large painting, Opening of the First Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia by H.R.H. The Duke of Cornwall and York (Later King George V), May 9, 1901, 1903, and shows some of its preparatory paintings. It also includes a group of twelve works from Roberts’s period in London 1903–1923, and a further twelve works produced after his return to Australia. It aims to show that these works are the product not of ‘a disappointed man’ (as often previously argued), but of a new approach and a new aesthetic (emphasising the point that Roberts continually changed his approach and his direction over his life, from earliest times to late). It notes that on his return to Australia Roberts painted works of visual poetry, in response to his delight at being back home where, as he described it, ‘it had the sensation that as a child you thought it would be going to heaven’.” – National Gallery of Australia