Do Go On - Do Go On Presents: Arty Facts - Shearing the Rams

Episode Date: September 19, 2022

An English-Born painter helped birth Australian Impressionism and along the way created perhaps the most iconic work of that movement. This is the story of Tom Roberts’ Shearing the Rams! Matt Stewart tells Shearing the Rams' story in this episode of Arty Facts. Watch the video of this podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbBwMXTIVoc 'Do Go On Presents: Arty Facts' is a joint production from Stupid Old Studios and the Do Go On podcast. Do Go On are Dave Warneke, Jess Perkins and Matt Stewart. Stupid Old Studios is an independent production house based in Melbourne Australia who specialise in making fine, handcrafted nonsense. Twitter: http://twitter.com/stupidoldInstagram: http://instagram.com/stupidoldFacebook: http://facebook.com/stupidoldstudios This production was made possible with support from the Community Broadcasting Foundation. Find out more at http://cbf.org.au Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Melbourne and Canada, we got exciting news for you. And we should also say this is 2026. Jess, what year is it? 2026. Thank God you're here. Right now, I'm in Melbourne doing my show with Serenji Amarna, 630 each night at the Cooper's Inn Hotel, having so much fun. We'd love to see you there.

Canada, we are visiting you in September this year. If you've somehow missed the news, we are heading up Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, and Toronto for shows. That's going to be so much fun. Tickets for all this stuff, I believe, are online. And I'm here too. You're listening to Artifacts, a show that dives into the fascinating history of famous artworks and painters. Broadcast on C-31, Stupid Old Studios YouTube channel and the Community Radio Network.

English-born painter Tom Roberts helped birth Australian Impressionism and along the way created one of the movement's masterpieces. Yeah, I said it. This week, we're talking about Shearing the Rams. Welcome to Artifax. I'm Matt Stewart and I'm here with my very good friends, Dave Warnocky and, Jess... Jess. That'll do.

Hello, thanks for having us. Thank you so much for having us. Thanks so much for joining me here. In your house. What a beautiful home. The Ian Potter Center is my lounge room. I think of it as Melden's lounge room. How comfy is it?

It was the Yarrow your toilet? No, no. The Yarrow is my bar. So we're here today to talk about this painting, which is a beautiful coincidence as we have. sitting right in front of it now. Are you familiar with it? Yes.

I can actually say that. Most of the ones that we've done in this series, no. But this one, yes, I am familiar with this one. It feels blasphemous, but for me, no. Yeah, interesting. Huh. Well, you're going to learn a bit about it now, Dave. It's an icon.

I'm loving what I'm saying. It's like an icon meeting in icon. Thanks. And magic's being made. So are your name? So I'm going to tell you a bit about the artist Tom Roberts. And then we'll get onto the. this icon of the art world, shearing the Rams.

Can you tell? Great title. Yeah, it is what it says it is. But we'll start with the artist, Tom Roberts. He was born on either the 8th or the 9th of March in 1856. They're not sure which one. It depends on whether you trust his birth certificate or his tombstone. Oh.

Personally when it comes to births, I got the birth certificate. Feels like that's right in its area of expertise. But the birth certificate didn't say anything about his date of death. No, it didn't. He didn't trust the team's name for that one. Exactly. So he was born in Dorchester in England. After his father, Richard, died, his mother, Matilda, immigrated with Tom and his two siblings

to Australia, where they lived in Collingwood, the suburb of Melbourne from 1869. Nice. The first years in Australia were tough, with the family struggling to make ends meet. Tom started becoming interested in art, and by 1873, he was studying at the Collingwood and Carlton artisan school of design. He quickly showed promise and was awarded a prize for landscape painting. How many of them are you got? Three. Only two. Oh, I don't know about any. Don't ask me to do people though. Cannot even do stick figures. Landscapes? I'm amazing. Harder noses. Oh, don't give me started.

Oh, he's done so many of them too. Yeah, he's a noses. Really all of them have a nose. There's a guy up the back with a hat covering his nose. Yeah. That's a trick I is. Stuff the nose up. It's too hard. In 1874, he enrolled at the National Gallery of Victoria's Art School. So this part of what is now the in Potter Centre, NGV, he studied. It's interesting the NGV has such a long history which is kind of cool.

And there he became friends with another future legend of Australian painting, Frederick McCubbin. Ring any bells? Yes. He did that one there, for instance. Wow. I'm still getting over, but that was a little print of that painting was in our lounge room when I was a kid. And it's so wild to be sitting near the real one.

You never seen it? No, I've never seen it. How cool. Yeah, so cool. While studying at the NGV school, McCubbin was nicknamed the Prof. He loved to read and the other students loved to hear what he'd learnt. So they called him the Prof. Roberts, on the other hand, was nicknamed Bulldog.

So we had Bulldog and the Prof. I love that and I'm buying that album. from 1881 to 1884. They were split up because Bulldog travelled to London where he was selected to study at the Royal Academy of Arts. He was one of the first Aussie artists to get the call up over there.

While he was over in London, he also spent a few weeks in Spain and while he was travelling, he was introduced to the principles of impressionism and plan air painting. You familiar with plan air painting? No. Don't have any idea what it was?

I... Have you know, have you know, Have you not got a rundown your coping game? I'm going to fucking. I'm sorry. I mean, Matt did that tell me actually before, but I thought that I was supposed to play along. You were going to explain what I was.

I said you at the time, I'm like, this will give you a chance to look smart. And you hooked it. But what I would have done is going, I think that's where, um, when you're out in the open, you're painting, a landscape out in the open. You would have said, I told you that before.

No, I wouldn't have. No, I wouldn't have. No, you wouldn't. Now, I'm really enjoying the story of this piece, but to be honest, I don't really trust Matt and what he's saying so. So I thought I'd bring in a couple of experts from the NGV to really set the record straight. And hello to Angela Heson and David Hurlston.

Hello. Thank you so much for joining me. First of all, I just wanted to ask you about the artist Roberts and where he fits into the Australian landscape. So Tom Roberts is a really important figure for Australian art. He's certainly one of the most loved Australian artists at NGV. We think about Roberts' Australian precursors, people like Eugen von Gerard, who were very much in the kind of romantic tradition where they are removed from the landscape. They're looking at it as something wondrous and sublime. Roberts and his friends were all about embedding themselves in it, getting to know it

really intimately. So we see landscapes that have no horizon line, a new sense of real familiarity with Australian bushes and trees. And there's that sense of this is something that is familiar, that is home, but that's being painted in a really revolutionary way. And in fact that was the start of what we know now or we refer to as the Australian Impressionism movement, where the artists would get together and go on these camps into the bush. And actually, it's interesting to note that Victorian ideas around propriety and gender played a real part in this.

So Sutherland and other women artists weren't able to stay overnight at the camps because that was seen as indecent when there were men staying there. So they would trek out on the train, they'd take all their canvases and their materials, and they'd spend the day painting with the men, and then they'd have to go home again in the evening. And then do it all again the next day. And it's for this time.

And actually the painting behind us is an unusually large example of Sutherland's work, but a lot of these women were painting most of the time on a smaller scale in part just because they had to carry all of those materials. And materials were really expensive and they were paid less too. So it was a difficult time, but they made a go of it less. Yeah, yeah. So Planeer painting, basically, it's the practice of painting landscape pictures out of doors. Ah.

Or outside, as you might say today. I would say out of doors. It's a French term, I believe. So you're out in the landscape, while you paint the landscape that you're in. Picture it, you're out there. Yeah, doing a bit of this. That's right. You got the big easel out.

Yep. You just look slightly over one side of the canons and go, ah yes. Back to it, yeah. That's right. That's Plane Air. Yeah, nice. The things he learnt in Europe help shape his style, and according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, one of my favourite website. Great source.

It's a great source. Love the ADB. be. He returned to Melbourne in 1885 at precisely the right moment to instigate a new school of painting based on plan air practice, which was allied to notions of nationalism and regionalism. I love that he precisely the right moment. He stepped off the boat and some were saying, I reckon we need a new school and he went, I've got an idea. That's pretty much what happened. Yeah, it was interesting because at that time, around that time. It's the first time they were more Australian-born people than European immigrants living in Australia. You know what I mean? And apparently they were starting to go, all the old Europeans

were starting, or the young Europeans were going, we need to start getting our own identity here. Forget the motherland. We're a country now, or we're about to be. Still weren't, but it was moving that way. So they wanted the art to reflect it. The ADB goes on. Robert's Melbourne colleagues immediately benefited from his experience. Arthur Streaton, for one, later claimed that Bulldog's example was crucial. For him, it was a big deal. In the following years, after his return, Roberts and McCubbin, aka... The Propp and the Bulldog. The Proff. Roberts and McCubbin started going on painting trips with others, including Streeter, as well as Charles Condor. You can see a Condor just sort of... They would camp in places

like Box Hill, Mentone and later in the Heidelberg area. A couple of those paintings over there are from the Mentone trips. Looks very different these days. It does look a little different. Quite different, yeah. Yeah, it was before the edgy was there, for instance. That famous pub. That we've all been to.

We've all been too. Dollar Pots Wednesday nights. That's a good deal. That's too good a deal. That's a dangerous deal. It was a dangerous deal. Roberts later said, we went to the bush and tried to get it down as truly as we could. That was always his ambition. Roberts' 1886 painting, as you can see here, the artist camp portrays one of their camping trips to Box Hill.

That's Frederick McCubbin seated by the tent. And another artist, Lewis Abraham's in the hat. Lewis has just cooked some chops. And what he's doing here is showing Frederick McCubbin the freshly cooked chops. Look this. Hey, Fred. Check out me chop. Yeah. No truer representation of that will you find.

No, it's his nickname with the hat. Yeah, it was the hat. No, it was chom. Poor dog the problem, hat. Some people call me chop. You know why. These plan air trips were the beginning of what would come to be known as the Hidalberg School. Art critic Sydney Dickinson coined the term the Hidalberg School in 1891 when reviewing works by Arthur Streaton and Walter Wither's.

Since then, the term has evolved to incorporate all painters who went on these Plenair artist camps around Melbourne and Sydney in the 1880s and 1890s. So we don't count. If we went there now, it doesn't. You could go to an artist camp in Box Hill now, but I'm afraid you don't make this count. It's got it's both time and place. Sorry, mate. So if I went to place some laser tag at Dark Zone in Box Hill, that wouldn't count. That doesn't count. Yeah.

Are you kidding me? Well, you'd come up with another thing. Laser tag can be art. You could be the Lasertag Box Hill School. A lot of the artists we've mentioned, Rob's included, have often been referred to as being part of the Heidelberg School. David, can you tell us more about that term? I mean, certainly the artist painted in Heidelberg, but they painted in lots of other locations

around Melbourne, but also in Sydney. So that's a commonly used term, but we like to use the term Australian Impressionism to more accurately capture that sort of movement. I think one of the things that was really important for them was finding new areas of inspiration and after the turn of the century several of them go back to Europe again. So Roberts after sort of 1901 is back in London for a number of years. They're really quite nomadic. According to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1889, along with McCubbin, Street and Condor and others,

Roberts staged the 9 by 5 impression exhibition in Melbourne, which consisted of impressions of bush and city life rapidly painted on cigar box lids. So I think it was in part because they didn't have a lot of cash for campuses and whatever. So they just reused these cigar box lids, little paintings, and they had this, it became quite an influential exhibition. Although art critic for the Argus newspaper, James Smith, condemned most of the paintings as a pain to the eye. Just too small?

Oh, I can't, oh, I can't see it properly. A pain to the eye. Yeah. Okay. That's pretty rough. Yeah. That's rough for it. It's like we've got to put himself in the eye with a cigar.

Yeah, I think it was unrelated to the art. Despite being scorned by a conservative critic, this groundbreaking show reinforced the group's claim that they were creating a new type of art in Australia. Cup of that Smith, your dog. What do you know? According to the State Library of New South Wales, the success of the wool industry made many squatters and pastoralists

immensely wealthy, and by the 1880s the wool business was booming. Hey, we'll get under wool. That feels relevant. Yeah, that's why I mentioned it. According to the Wheeler Centre, when Tom Roberts painted Shearing the Rams, he wanted to create a painting that would represent Australian life. What do you reckon? Is that how you see Australian life?

Yeah, pretty much, yeah. Like a bloody sharehouse in Fitzroyd, am I right? Yeah, my life is reflected in his painting, very much so. In 1888, Roberts visited Brocklesby Sheep Station north of the Murray River. Here's a photo of the shearing shed from the NGV archives. Roberts took that himself. Wow. So this is the outside of what he painted here.

Observing the shearers, Roberts drew around 80 sketches on his first trip there. A few of them are still in existence, you can see. He returned there twice more to continue work on what would become shearing the ramps. According to Lee Asprey in an essay featured on the NGV website, Roberts picked out the most characteristic and picturesque of the shearers, Imagine how brutal that would be. Oh yeah. You have a made a cut.

Line up, Phil. No. No. No. You're going. You're a great personality, mate, but that doesn't come across in paint. Well, come back tomorrow in case he falls through. Yeah.

Can you have a bath tonight and come back tomorrow? Not in those shoes. Well, a few of them aren't wearing shoes. I know, it's a bit of an oh-h-s issue. There's this young chap down here on the bottom. No protective shoes. No. No shoes at all.

No. What do you think about that? Yeah. A bloke over there, smoking his pipe with a bit. A bushy beard? That's a recipe for disaster. Good to know that these are the hoties. Yes, this is the hottest of the hot. You wanted it to represent Australia?

Yes. And we're a nation of hoties. Absolutely. We went through a similar process casting the show. Yeah, absolutely. Should see the archers behind the camera. Oh my God. They're disgusting. A couple of interesting things.

The shearing shed stood until 1965, was burnt down, unfortunately, in a bushfire. But before it was burned, someone went up and reclaimed some of the panels from the walls where Roberts had actually cleaned his brushes, wiped the brushes on the wood from the wall. And we've got those now in the collection. Oh, wow. We've done the tests and the paint matches exactly the paint in the painting. So we know that there is an element at least that he painted in situ on location. He was right there.

He was right there. After the shearers went home at the end of the day, Roberts continued painting, paying a couple of local girls to kick up dust in the empty shed to recreate the hectic atmosphere of shearing time. They just got paid to just kick dust around. That's a job I can get behind. What's the hourly rate for a dust kicker? Oh, I'd charge nine.

Nine bucks? Yeah, even back then. Back then. I believe the tar boy here was one of the girls. What did you call him so? Tar boy. The tar boy. Yeah, tar boy was a job, I think.

Yeah, they had to patch up maybe wounds or something. That is grim. Yeah. Look, I can't believe how happy is about it. Having a great time. A psychopath. Yeah. I can't wait until they cut one of these shit.

I love it when a sheep bleeds. It's possible because she wasn't actually a tar boy. Maybe that's why she hadn't seen the grim reality of it. She's posing there in an empty room. Asprey continues. It was not until sometime in May 1890 that Roberts eventually finished the painting in his Melbourne studio. Shearing the Rams was a carefully and consciously formulated painting executed over a long period, not an informal slice of life glimpsed in an Australian shearing shed. They might be

like, oh, this is just a little snapshot? But he really, I mean, there's models, he picked out the prettiest. It's carefully put together. And put together over a few years. It's so hot. He's cast it. It's a little play. That's right. This is what our neighbours was based on. That's Joe Mangle. Deep cut that one. What makes Robert's treatment of the shearing theme unique is the conscious attempt to achieve the heroization

of pastoral labor and his rendering of the light and atmosphere in the shearing shed. They look heroic. One of the criticisms I read that people had at the time was that they used the old manual shears, even though like the electrical motorised or whatever shears had come in a couple years earlier. But it's sort of it's still, it's already like a slightly nostalgic look. That's what happens when it takes you years to paint something. Yeah.

Stuff becomes obsolete. We don't have a tar boy anymore. That's a tar man. When Robert showed Shearing the Rams in 1890, James Smith, you'd remember mentioning before. Here we go. What did he think? Not only was he a leading art critic at the Argus, but he was also a trustee here at the NGV. And he found the painting too naturalistic saying...

Oh my God. It's a little too real. A little too real. I mean, where are the spaceships? Yeah. Where are they? I mean, I can go and see this on a farm. You're an artist, make it more interesting.

Yeah. Sorry, what did he actually said? Well, he said, art should be of all times, not of one time, of all places, not of one place. I don't know what he wants to see. But then if it was somehow a piece of art from all places and all times, he'd be like, I want a more specific experience. Yeah, too busy.

Apparently Roberts counted Smith's criticism saying, By making art the perfect expression of one time and one place, it becomes for all time and for all places. Basically, like, yes, Smith? Stop that. Smith also said, we did not go to an art gallery to see how sheep is Sean. Oh my, okay. What does this guy go for a gallery for?

Yeah, what's he go for? Yeah, it's everything. I don't know. It just feels like he didn't like Roberts that much. I think he did review Roberts favorably at some point, but yeah, seemed to have a few digs at him as well. Roberts was keen to sell the painting to the NGV, but they passed, and I think this was due to Smith's influence as well as the director of the time, George Ford.

Follingsby, he also wasn't a fan. But there were people who wanted it and there were other journalists who were like, this is great, it'd be, it'd be silly not to purchase it, NGV, and it'd be like, this, people don't go to galleries to see sheep, they want to see paintings. And then someone's like, it's a painting of a sheep. Oh, well it's too late, I've already said no. It'll look silly if I call this. Yeah, now I'll be embarrassed. Others, as I say, viewed the painting much more favorably. A glowing article in TableTale magazine from May 1890 wrote, The whole work is alive with action and animation.

Every figure suggests life and motion, and each point in the picture worthily forms a picture of itself. Like, there's a bunch of art in the art. Also, the same review also says, it is strikingly representative of the life of the country and, as such, will unquestionably achieve distinction. They were big wraps on it. They were saying it's the life of the country.

That is everything, everywhere. All at once. Yes. Okay, I'm getting confused now. I said, Mr. Roberts' painting is always strong, but in the present case, it is masterly. They loved it. That's a rave review.

Five stars. That's a five star. That's five stars. Well, it reads like a five. It reads like a five, yeah, for sure. It eventually was sold privately after the NGV passed on it to Edward Trenchard. who worked in the wool industry and it was displayed in his Melbourne office.

I think also at the Paris end of Collins Street. That's a big office. Yeah. In the following years, Roberts continued to focus on the Australian bush, with further paintings depicting life on sheep stations as well as bush ranging. According to Art Gallery of New South Wales, his increasingly large-scale paintings paid homage to rural life and pastoral industry, as the golden fleece from 1894,

or the dangers and romance of bush-ranging, as in bailed up. You'd see how posed that is. Look at the pose. It's so posed. It would be hard to get horses to pose, wouldn't it? Got to super glue them to the ground. That's right.

Which they're made of that, so it's... Yeah. They're sort of self-sourcing in that way, self-glue him. He was commissioned to paint the opening of the first federal parliament of Australia. So it's funny, he's not that well respected, not particularly, some of his contemporaries were much more beloved in their lifetimes but he was commissioned to paint the opening of the federal parliament which was dubbed the big picture that was sort of what it's become known as this painting was

completed in London in 1903 and yet is still displayed at Parliament House up in Canberra today after further travel in Belgium the Netherlands and Italy and some modest successes at the Royal Academy of Arts in London Roberts returned to Australia in 1919 he settled in Calista outside Melbourne where he continued to paint small evocative landscapes until his death in 1931. But it was sort of seen as a decline. Most biographies talk about these last 30 years is a bit of an artistic decline. He had patches where he didn't paint anything at all for years at a time.

That's quite a decline. Yes. In output anyway. Yeah, yeah. He was sort of didn't, because he wasn't getting the acclaim. He wasn't getting that much work. So he was sort of struggling to know which direction to go in, not realizing that a lot of the work he'd done were already bona fide,

Yeah, so the same as well as him, his painting was also not seen as necessarily as the classic until later. Joy of Museums describes the work as one of the best known and most loved pictures in Australia. It is a masterpiece of Australian Impressionism and an iconic representation of Australia's significant wool industry. And according to the Wheeler Centre, his image of men hard at work in a shearing station has endured since as a symbol of iconic national values like, like hard work and mateship, and of the characters who live and work in country Australia. In time, the painting became ubiquitous, at least to everyone but Dave,

in Australian culture, as David Hanson wrote in 2007, this is the picture we all recognize from school books, calendars, jigsaw puzzles, matchboxes, and postage stamps. Probably the only Australian picture well enough known to be used in an advertisement for men's underpants. It's also used in a hardware at at one point. That's how you know you've made it. Yeah.

During his life, the NGV only purchased one of his works, a 1919 painting named Penelope. But since then, they've become big fans, and they now own 60 of his works. Wow. Okay. Yeah. While the painting is seen as a representation

of Australian identity, is clearly through a particularly white European and masculine lens. Many artists have since subverted it in different ways, an example being Diane Jones. Jones' Shearing the Rams from 2001. Of her work, Jones wrote, I've used this iconic painting by Tom Roberts to highlight that indigenous people were shearers too.

I've kept the original title of Tom Roberts painting, Shearing the Rams, because I did not think that I needed to change it in any way, because this is a portrayal of history that I know is true. My father was a gun shearer and my brother was also a shearer. In 1979, Pam Debenham created an altered version of the work titled Strong feminine labour as a feminist recreation. Other works that are thought to directly reference Robert's iconic painting include George Washington Lambert's 1921 work, Weighing the Fleece, and Marcus Beelby's Sir John Sulman Prize winning Crutching the Hughes from 1987. So this iconic

Australian painting's influence has lived on for many generations after Roberts journeyed out to the Brocklesby Sheep Station. I think it's probably one of our most recognizable paintings certainly you know it's one of our most love when something is set up as a national narrative you know when you when you paint something as an intentional icon which Roberts really did that almost kind of occupy the place of religious painting or history painting in a way those kinds of images are really right for appropriation and parody and you think who is privileged and celebrated in these kinds of images you know and we think very

much this is an image of white masculinity a particular rugged version of that that of course doesn't necessarily represent what we would see as the kind of national identity that we want to exclusively embrace today. So I think in a way it's kind of inevitable that that happens to images like these. To celebrate its 130th anniversary in 2020 the NGV loaned the painting to the Wangarada Art Gallery about an hour down the road from the sheep station it was painted at. Keith Wys, the grandson of one of the shearers in the painting, Jack Was, This guy here. Oh, cool.

He had drink coasters with the painting on his dining table for as long as he could remember. But it wasn't until 2020 that he actually saw the painting in real life, which you can see him doing. That's so nice. That's him on the left there. That's the story of Shearing the Rams. What do you reckon? Love it. Shout out to the Tar Boy.

Oh yeah. Tar Boy is the real star, I think. Second, maybe only to this ram that really looks like it's accepted its fate. Yeah. It's just kind of like, alright, let's get it over and done with. Yeah, it's so sad, but it's interesting how maybe if you're an artist, right, you can just go, look, I know I'm not a big deal now, but do you just wait till I die? Yeah. Then I'll show them.

Yeah. That's really a pep talk for you, don't. Good takeaway, thanks. Do you know what I'd do? I would fake my own death. Wait for my art to get really popular. Rada. Come back.

Money, money, money, money, money. And that's the ultimate, ultimate artistic performance. Exactly, yeah, yeah, it'll be performance art. That's great. So you can't be mad at me because I was just doing art. Yeah. Doogh Presents Artifacts has been made with the support of the Community Broadcasting Foundation and is available nationwide on the Community Radio Network.

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