How did an Englishman become one of Australia's greatest artists?

Tom Robert’s work is jammed with the blazing heat of an Australian summer. It bleaches the landscape and deepens the shadows.

There are few Australian artists’ who can evoke such heat with a brush and palette – and are so closely identified with what it means to be Australian. Tom produced some truly iconic works that are embedded in the Australian psyche.

And yet, he was so particularly English. He spoke with a British accent in clear incisive tones. His pre-teen years were spent in England and he would later return to the United Kingdom, to London, to study at the Royal Academy Schools and much later his portrait, Madame Hartl, was hung on the line at the Royal Academy in 1910.

Like many of his contemporaries, even those born in Australia, he still considered Britain home, despite spending more than half his life in Australia.

Perhaps it was his Englishness that gave him the perspective to see the landscape and capture its harsh beauty. He saw the countryside with fresh eyes and trips between Great Britain and Australia only helped accentuate his love for the bush.

In a letter to his family he wrote of “the air fresh and smelling of the land and the burnt grass of the roadside. The old gums, you know them, like lace against the warm moonlight sky. The road winding through bush, by cottages and bungalows.”

After being abroad for almost 20 years, the bush rekindled something inside him. He loved “the breathless stillness of it all” with “only now and again a cricket or cicada or the pony moving in the yellow grass of the garden”.

And suddenly we’re sitting alongside him on a stool on a hot, still hillside, as he works rapidly, making a small impression on canvas to be worked into a bigger artwork in his studio. Bursting into Carmen, entirely engrossed in his work. This is the Englishman that showed us how to embrace our country for what it was.