TOM ROBERTS

Dr. Norman Behan, Brisbane
Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 1971
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above

Winter Exhibition 1971, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 1971, cat. 11, illus. as 'On the Banks of the Yarra at Heidelberg'

Topliss, H., Tom Roberts 1856-1931, a catalogue raisonne, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, cat. 135, vol. I, p. 110, vol. II, illus. pl. 62 as 'Untitled River landscape'

Good condition. UV inspection reveal retouching to upper centre edges of tree and centre of tree.
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Roberts's biographer, Helen Topliss, suggests that the trees in this quiet, romantic painting are sheoaks (Casuarina). Certainly the scene evokes the environs of the Eaglemont artists' camp, by the Yarra at Heidelberg, where Roberts spent most of his summers from 1888 to 1890. Arthur Streeton had first discovered the old homestead at Eaglemont where he and Roberts and Charles Conder 'camped' and as many as sixty artists and students sometimes visited at weekends. Streeton later recalled it in a letter to Roberts: 'I thought of our Heidelberg times the other day. The brilliant clear blue mornings with the faint Dandenongs, the round she oaks... & Oleander & Japonica & Pine Cones scattering on the dewy grass... & the thick small cypruss trees near the Tennis Court...- & the Fair Open hilltop where K.[Conder] did his "Evening Star" & the row of Hazels and Pear trees. Pines round the Well & Bill Peg fishing & the... shortcut to Ivanhoe; and the long warm afternoons of coppery light'.¹ 'The water is rendered with broad touches of brown and blue... On the reverse he began a portrait that has touches of pigment on it that match the landscape on the recto... [T]he remaining touches in the sky and the detail brought back with a brush end on the trees suggest an earlier rather than a later date. The full-face portrait on the verso would also concur with an earlier date'.²

1. Letter from Streeton to Roberts, 7 August 1908; in Galbally, A. and Gray, A., Letters from Smike, the Letters of Arthur Streeton 1890-1943, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989, p. 113.
2. Helen Topliss, Tom Roberts 1856-1931: a catalogue raisonne, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, vol. I, p. 110.