Sherbrooke Forest is a very deliberate construction: a screen design of attenuated light and dark patternings cut by curved foreground form. It was a compositional device Roberts had used previously in his landscapes but never with such architectonic effect and it was to characterise his last years of painting.

Here is an intrinsically quiet work; an understated scene stamped with the atmospheric realities of Roberts’ solitary times in the forest. This, and his other late landscapes, transcends mere descriptiveness for ‘visual poetry’. It was the tight screen of striped verticals that Fred Williams, a long admirer of Roberts’ art, was arrested by when he studied the painting at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.