Tom Roberts

Tom Roberts-Life story

Tom Roberts (1856-1931), artist, was born on 9 March 1856 at Dorchester, Dorset, England, elder son of Richard Roberts, journalist, and his wife Matilda Agnes Cela, née Evans. Tom was educated at Dorchester Grammar School. After her husband's death Matilda and her three children migrated in 1869 to Melbourne where they lived at Collingwood. The first years were difficult for a poor family and Tom helped his mother to sew satchels after work. He soon became interested in art and studied at the Collingwood and Carlton artisans' schools of design in 1873; at the latter Louis Buvelot and Eugen von Guerard awarded him a prize for a landscape. In 1874 he joined the National Gallery School where he attended Thomas Clark's classes in design. Though the school listed his occupation as photographer, his responsibilities at Stewart's, photographers in Bourke Street, were confined to arranging backdrops and studio sets and sometimes posing the sitters for portraits.

Roberts was one of the first painters to recognize the special character of the Australian landscape; Studley Park, Kew, was close to where he lived (in Johnston Street) and he introduced his friend Fred McCubbin to the native flora there. Encouraged by Clark and his other teachers, Roberts resolved to gain further experience in London, and the Victorian Academy of Arts helped by providing him with a bursary. Already ambitious to paint subject pictures, he had attended anatomy classes at the University of Melbourne. Roberts was the first major Australian painter to be selected to study at the Royal Academy of Arts which he attended from 1881 to 1884, benefiting especially from tuition in anatomy and perspective. To help make ends meet he contributed illustrations to the Graphic.

In London he was especially influenced by a variety of regional groups who eventually formed the nucleus of the New English Arts Club in 1886; these artists from centres such as Newlyn and Glasgow rejected the...