Theme National narratives
‘Shearing the rams is a work by which Mr. Roberts name will always be remembered.’ Table Talk, 30 May 1890
The 1880s and 1890s were a time of change in Australian art and a period when artists began to talk about an Australian tradition. They sought to portray subjects that they believed would distinguish Australian life from that lived elsewhere. Roberts travelled widely around Australia, and particularly to sheep stations in rural New South Wales, where he worked on his major national narratives Shearing the rams, A break away! and The Golden Fleece. He sought to create majestic images that recorded the hard work of European settlers in ‘taming’ the land.
Roberts’ observation of atmosphere, colour and light is evident in all of his national narratives. No artist before Roberts had captured the fierce glare of the hot Australian sun to such an extent as he did in paintings such as A break away!. Movement, or its absence, is also central to these works. The two shearing pictures are careful arrangements of figures in motion, in which he used the ideas of Muybridge to convey movement. While A break away! is an action picture that dramatically conveys man and animals in motion, counterpointed against the verticals and diagonals of the landscape.
‘… by making art the perfect expression of one time and place, it becomes art for all time and of all places.’
Roberts, The Argus, 4 July 1890
Bailed up and In a corner on the Macintyre (The bushranger) form a pair, with the bushranger ‘bailing up’ the coach in one work and being ‘bailed up’ himself in the other. Roberts depicted these scenes in a matter-of-fact manner, uninterested in creating a false sense of drama. They depict movement as stilled for a moment, a sense of breath held while under attack. In both works, Roberts also conveyed the glare and intense heat of summer in the Australian bush.
Fred Williams’ My garden 1965–67 was painted in response to what he considered to be Australia’s greatest landscape painting, Bailed up, stripped of narrative and emphasising the vertical landscape with strokes of paint for trees.
