Tom Roberts – founder of the “Box Hill School”
Today is the birthday of the famous Australian landscape artist, Tom Roberts, who painted some of his iconic paintings in and around Box Hill.
Roberts, who was born in 1856, established along with his friend Frederick McCubbin, a weekend painting camp on Houston’s Farm at Box Hill in 1885. Over a three year period until late 1888, the camp at Box Hill provided an opportunity for the fledgling members of Melbourne’s artistic community to meet, exchange ideas and fellowship, and to investigate the possibilities of painting ‘en plein air’ (‘in the open air’), directly from nature. Many of the first great works of the Australian Impressionist movement were painted there.
Although the Box Hill camp pre-dated the artists’ colony at Eaglemont by three years, Tom Roberts and his fellow artists were designated the ‘Heidelberg School’ by a visiting American critic, a term still widely used today. However, with increasing recognition of the importance of the work done by Roberts and other artists in and around Box Hill, there is a strong case for the school to be renamed the ‘Box Hill School’ instead!
(Information sourced from ‘Prelude to Heidelberg: The Artists’ Camp at Box Hill’ by Eleanor Finlay and Marjorie Morgan)