Theme Late Australia

‘There was something in the artist that, seeing beauty, 
could communicate it to those with him – never looked hills 
so blue and dreaming distant; never trees on the nearer slope so finely traced; never clouds massed so bold and luminous as when his appreciation beside one seemed to see it into one’s own eyes …’
Jessie Traill about Roberts

When Roberts visited Melbourne for about a year at the end of 1919 he wrote that: ‘It all came back to me when I sat there with the blue sweep of the [Dandenong] Ranges before me, and the sunshine warm and golden and the dear remembered beauty.’

Roberts returned to Australia permanently in 1923, and purchased a property at at South Sassafras (later renamed Kallista) in the Dandenong Ranges, Victoria. There, he painted intimate landscapes in a low-key palette; works with sustaining qualities.

As a commentator wrote in April 1932 in the catalogue foreword to the posthumous exhibition at the Melbourne Fine Art Gallery, his late paintings ‘represent his love and poetic vision for all that is beautiful in Nature and his sympathy with the Australian landscape in its tenderest moods’.