Tom Roberts Australian, 1856-1931

Collection of William Grant Buckle, Sydney (1894-1947); thence by descent 

Private collection, Perth

Retrospective Exhibition, Tom Roberts, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1947-48, cat. 75, lent by Mrs W. G. Buckle

John Brackenreg at Wales House Gallery, Sydney, [1960s], cat. 36

Virginia Spate, 'Tom Roberts', unpublished MA thesis, The University of Melbourne, 1964, cat. 384

Helen Topliss, Tom Roberts 1856-1931: a Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, vol. I, cat. 525, p. 199, vol. II, pl. 213, illus.  

In the summer of 1921 Roberts went to Dorset with his son Caleb, visiting friends in Poole and then Lytchett-Maltravers where Roberts stayed on alone to work for about a fortnight. He was there again the following spring and autumn, as he told journalists on his return to Australia: 'Shortly before leaving England we spent some memorable weeks down in Thomas Hardy's country. The Dorset villages are ideal subjects for an artist... and I made many sketches of those beautiful types of scenery'.¹ This was Roberts's 'native' country, for he was born in Dorset, at Dorchester, and had many memories of his time there before emigrating to Australia at the age of thirteen. Both A windy day, Dorset and lot 18, English landscape with cottage, are, in Mary Eagle's words, 'softened and domesticated, secure and peaceful - convalescent images such as many artists produced after World War I'. A larger Dorset landscape of 1922, The First of Spring, Wessex, is in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.

1. The Register (Adelaide), 17 February 1923, p. 13 and see The Argus, Melbourne, 19 February 1923, p. 10, quoted in Eagle, M., The Oil Paintings of Tom Roberts in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997, pp. 101, 103.