Roberts, Tom (1856-1931), an Australian landscape painter, founded Australian Impressionism. He also is considered the founder of a native landscape school of painting in Australia. Roberts led a group of artists known as the Heidelberg School. Their work was based on painting in open air rather than in a studio. The subjects of Roberts’s most famous works included shearing sheds and sheep station incidents. His painting Bailed Up is now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Thomas William Roberts was born on March 9, 1856, in Dorchester, England. He settled in Australia with his widowed mother in 1869. Roberts moved back to England to study art in 1881 at the Royal Academy. During a walking tour of Spain in 1883, he learned about Impressionism from artists who had studied in Paris. Roberts returned to Australia in 1885. He was part of a group of Australian artists who held the country’s first Impressionist exhibition in 1889. Roberts was commissioned to paint the opening of the first Commonwealth Parliament in 1901, completing the work in London in 1903. He remained in Europe until 1923, when he settled permanently in Australia. Roberts died on Sept. 14, 1931.
See also Heidelberg School .
