TOM ROBERTS

Private collection, United Kingdom

Very good original condition. Mary Anne has abrasions (from frame) down left edge. Joseph has small scratch (3 cm.) lower left edge.
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These works are accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by Helen Topliss

Although his Naturalist landscapes and heroic 'National Pictures' were the works that brought Tom Roberts lasting fame, it was portraiture that largely sustained him economically in the early part of his career. Adopting and adapting elements of the work of British precursors such as John Everett Millais, Frederick Watts and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Roberts became the most original, fluent and productive 'face maker' in Australia in the late 19th century.

This pair of portraits from the early 1890s depicts the parents of John St Vincent Welch, a Sydney insurance manager and a friend of the artist. Roberts painted Mary Ann Welch when she was visiting her son in Australia following Joseph's death in 1890. According to family tradition, 'she was so pleased by it that she commissioned one of her late husband, which Roberts painted from a photograph.'¹

Her portrait, with its flickering lace, shining rolls of hair and tenderly-rendered wrinkles around mouth and eyes is a sensitive representation of the widowed Mrs Welch, still wearing Victorian 'half-mourning'. Not surprisingly (given the absence of a living model) Joseph Welch is more broadly treated, both in terms of paint handling and of psychology. Indeed, Roberts seems to admit as much in a letter of 1895, in which he writes (almost certainly about this work): 'Please thank Welch for his kind message about the portrait – it was bound to be so – a painter needs to be able to form his own idea of the subject – that's hardly possible with a photograph.'²

The Welch family remained close to the artist until his departure for England in 1903 – Roberts exhibited a portrait of 'Mrs St Vincent Welch' (presumably John's wife Emily, née Thackeray) at the New South Wales Society of Artists in 1899.³

1.  Helen Topliss, Tom Roberts 1856 - 1931: a catalogue raisonne (2 vols.), Oxford University Press, Melboourne, 1985, vol. 1, p. 126
2.  Leter, Tom Roberts to S. W. Pring, 7 April 1895, Mitchell Library MSS 1367/2, no. 13
3.  The Society of Artists' Spring Exhibition, Vickery's Buildings, Sydney, August, 1899, cat. 15