Tom Roberts of Dorchester

Has there ever been an exhibition or retrospective of the paintings of Tom Roberts in Dorchester?

If not, it's high time there was!

Tom Roberts, whose father (d. 1868) was a newspaper editor, was born in Dorchester on 9 March 1856. He was thirteen when he emigrated to Australia in 1869, with his widowed mother, brother and sister. Mrs. Roberts had relatives in Melbourne, according to Virginia Spate ("Tom Roberts", 1978) and Jane Clark and Bridget Whitelaw ("Golden Summers, Heidelberg and Beyond", 1986).

He studied for three years at the Royal Academy Schools in London from 1881-1884 (he was twenty-five when he left for Europe in 1881), and he assisted at a hospital in England during World War I

He was considered the father of Australian landscape painting and a great portraitist.

The paintings illustrated are "Coming South", "A Break away!", "Shearing the Rams", "Holiday Sketch at Coogee", "Slumbering Sea, Mentone", "Mentone" and "Mosman's Bay".

The following very useful information is taken from www.dorset-ancestors.com

"Thomas William Roberts was born in Dorchester on March 9th, 1856, the son of a printer and reporter, Richard Roberts, then a sub-editor of the Dorset County Chronicle. Richard had married Tom’s mother, a Londoner named Matilda Agnes Cela Evans, in Shrewsbury early in 1851, and the census of that year showed that at that time he was still living with his parents, Thomas Roberts (50), described as a Brass Founder and his wife Hannah (48) both born in Shrewsbury. By 1861 however, Richard and Matilda had moved to Dorchester, having taken up residence in house in Fordington High Street. Their household consisted of Thomas, then 5, a one-year-old daughter, Alice Matilda, and an 11-year-old housemaid named Mary Wills.

Tom attended Dorchester Grammar School (until 1869) where he received a thorough grounding in the classics, learning quotations in Latin he was able to recall years later. During these schooldays his greatest accolade was winning a prize for scripture he later explained, “not by answering the question directly but by imaginatively writing on a related subject.”

On 30th December 1868, when Thomas was about 13 his father who was then editor of the Dorchester newspaper died aged only 41 at Wollaston Villas, All Saints Dorchester, leaving the family impoverished. His widow Hannah then courageously resolved that she and her children should leave to seek a new life in the then developing colony of Australia. A married sister of Hannah’s had herself emigrated to there some years before, so that the sisters could be re-united. Tom Roberts’ first home in his adopted country was a modest one in Dight Street, Collingwood, a suburb of Melbourne."

Virginia Spate notes that Roberts "went to London in early 1903...and remained there until 1919 when he visited Australia for a year...He left England for the last time in early 1923 and remained in Australia until his death in 1931...nearly half of his seventy-five years of life was spent in England...
In 1909 Roberts and his family moved to a house and studio about a mile north of Golders Green, an area which was still close to the country...
Roberts visited Italy again in 1914 but his stay was interrupted by the outbreak of war and he had an adventurous journey back to England. He painted relatively little during the next four years because at the age of fifty-eight he volunteered for duty in the R.A.M.C. and spent the war in the Third London Military Hospital...
His last stay in the English countryside was in Dorset where he had been born."

The Third London General Hospital was in Wandsworth.

It is interesting to note that one of his paintings in an 1889 Exhibition was based on Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd.

For a challenging view on Aboriginal Art and Interventionism (in relation to "Shearing the Rams") , see this comment.