National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Turner to Monet: the triumph of landscape

Roberts’s return to Melbourne in 1885, after four years’ study in Europe, marked the end of his long artistic apprenticeship. By the age of twenty-nine he had developed a sophisticated eye and an exceptional technical facility that enabled him to capture the appearance of things. He was also a proselytiser and, back home, looked up his old friend Frederick McCubbin (1855–1917) and enthused him about the European style of plein-air painting. Together they established a weekend painting camp on Houston’s Farm at Box Hill, some sixteen kilometres from the city. It was a primitive approximation to the artists’ colonies of Europe and America, but quickly became a hub of the new painting in Melbourne. Many of the first great works of the Australian Impressionist movement were painted there, in or near the patch of remnant bushland on Gardiners Creek where the camp was located. Paintings such as McCubbin’s Lost1and Roberts’s own A summer morning tiff2 and Wood splitters3captured the intimacy and patchy sunlight of