Shearing the Rams is an 1890 painting by Australian artist Tom Roberts. It depicts sheep shearers plying their trade in a timber shearing shed. Distinctly Australian in character, the painting is a celebration of pastoral life and work, especially "strong, masculine labour", and recognises the role that the wool industry played in the development of the country.
One of at least seventy sketches Robert made in preparation for Shearing the Rams
Roberts modelled his painting on a shearing shed at what is now called Killeneen, an outstation of the 24,000-hectare (59,000-acre) Brocklesby sheep station, near Corowa in the Riverina region of New South Wales.[3] The property was owned by the Anderson family, distant relations to Roberts, who first visited the station in 1886 to attend a family wedding.[4] Having decided on shearing as the subject for a painting, Roberts arrived at Brocklesby in the spring of 1888, making around 70 or 80 preliminary sketches of "the light, the atmosphere, the sheep, the men and the work" before returning to the station the following shearing season with his canvas.[5] Roberts' work was noted by the local press with reports of him "dressed in blue shirt and moleskins ... giving the last finishing touches to a picture in oils about 5ft by 4ft."[4]
Art historians had previously thought Roberts completed most of the painting in his Melbourne studio, using the sketches drawn in his time at Brocklesby.[4] In 2003 however, art critic and historian Paul Johnson wrote: "Tom Roberts spent two years, on the spot, painting Shearing the Rams".[6] New evidence was brought to light in 2006 that suggested that Roberts painted much of the work en plein air at the shearing shed itself.[4] In 2006, The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) conducted a scientific examination of paint left on a piece of timber salvaged from the now-destroyed shed, where it was thought that Roberts cleaned his brushes. The study confirmed that the paint, in a number of different shades, precisely matched the paint used in the painting. The senior curator of art at the NGV, Terence Lane, believes this is strong evidence that much of the work was done on location: "For me, that's evidence of a lot of time spent in that woolshed ... all those paint marks and the selection of colours indicates he spent so much time en plein air".[4]
The "smiling tarboy" at the center of the painting was modelled on local girl Susan Bourne, then 9 years old.
In a seeming anachronism, the painting shows sheep being shorn with blade shears rather than the machine shears which started to enter Australian shearing sheds in the late 1880s.[7] Art historian Terry Smith's suggestion that Roberts presented a deliberately historical vision of shearing has been questioned on account of there being no evidence that electric shears had been introduced to Brocklesby at the time of the painting's composition.[8] The young man carrying the fleece on the left of the painting alludes to the figure of Esau in Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise at the Florence Baptistery.[4] The model for the smiling tar-boy at the centre of the picture, the only figure to make eye contact with the viewer, was actually a girl, 9-year-old Susan Bourne, who lived until 1979. She also assisted Roberts by kicking up dust in the shed to allow him to capture some of the atmosphere.[4]
The white and pink striped shirt of the central shearer carries the highest tonal point of the composition, and is identical to that of Will Maloney's in an 1887 portrait by John Russell, a close friend of Roberts who spent much of his career in France. The trio travelled Europe together in the mid-1880s, and when Maloney returned to Melbourne in 1888, Russell instructed him to show the portrait to Roberts. It has therefore been speculated that the shearer's shirt is Roberts' tribute to his friends.[9]
An x-ray study of the painting in 2007, taken while the painting was being cleaned, unveiled Roberts' original sketch of the central shearer. In that original sketch, the shearer was lacking a beard and was more upright; the change to a stooping figure makes the shearer appear more in control of the sheep, improving his role as the painting's focus.[4]
John Thallon, a Melbourne frame-maker, provided the frame for many of Roberts' paintings, including this one.[10]
History
Photograph of a shearing shed outside Melbourne, taken by Charles Nettleton, c. 1880
Roberts was born in England in 1856 and migrated to Australia with his family in 1869, settling in Collingwood, a working-class suburb of Melbourne. A talented artist, Roberts attended classes at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School before returning to England in 1881 when he was selected to study at the Royal Academy of Arts. While touring Europe with Australian artist John Peter Russell, Roberts adopted the principles of impressionism and plein air painting and brought them back with him to Australia when he returned in 1885.[11] With like-minded artists, he helped to form the "Heidelberg School" movement, a group of Melbourne-based impressionists who depicted rural life and the bush, with nationalist and regionalist overtones.[11]
The Australian colonies celebrated the centenary of European settlement in 1880s, and for the first time, Australian-born Europeans outnumbered the immigrant population. These and other factors fostered strong nationalistic feeling and intense discussion about Australian history, culture and identity. Seeking to develop a national art, Roberts chose agricultural and pastoral subjects that would symbolise the embryonic nation, such as bushranging, droving and shearing.[4][11] In the 19th century, wool was a major source of wealth for the colonies, and by the 1870s, Australia had become the world's largest wool producer.[5] Historian Geoffrey Blainey states that shearers of that era, like Jackie Howe, were seen almost as "folk heroes" with shearing tallies reported in local newspapers in a similar manner to sports scores.[4] Shearers also inspired popular bush ballads around this time, such as "Click Go the Shears" and the poems of Banjo Paterson.[12] According to Paul Johnson, Shearing the Rams, like works by Heidelberg School member Arthur Streeton, illustrates the tribute paid by Australian artists to their country: "[they] saw the country as a place where hard work and determination were making it the world's paradise".[6] The painting itself is described by Johnson as a celebration of "the industry which produced the wealth" of Australia.[6]
It seems to me that one of the best words spoken to an artist is "Paint what you love, and love what you paint," and on that I have worked: and so it came that being in the bush and feeling the delight and fascination of the great pastoral life and work I have tried to express it [...] So lying on wool-bales ... it seemed that I had there the best expression of my subject, a subject noble and worthy enough if I could express the meaning and spirit—of strong masculine labour, the patience of the animals whose year's growth is being stripped from them for man's use and the great human interest in the whole scene.
Grosvenor Chambers, where Roberts made final touches to Shearing the Rams and first put it on exhibition
Roberts finished Shearing the Rams in May 1890 and unveiled it at his studio at Grosvenor Chambers on Collins Street, Melbourne.[4] There were immediately calls for the painting to enter a public gallery, with a Melbourne correspondent for the Sydney press stating, "if our national gallery trustees were in the least patriotic, they would purchase it."[13] Roberts wished to sell the painting to the National Gallery of Victoria, however this was opposed by key people at the gallery, including director George Folingsby and one of the trustees. Eventually he sold the painting to a local stock and station agent for 350 guineas; the agent displayed it in his office in Melbourne.[4][14] The NGV finally acquired the painting in 1932—one year after Roberts' death—using funds from the Felton Bequest.[15]
The painting was rehung in a new, wider frame in 2002; according to the NGV conservators this was in line with Roberts' original frame, which had been trimmed down over the years as framing fashion changed.[16] In 2006, the NGV began a major restoration of the picture, the first in over 80 years. The painting had slowly lost its cover as the natural resin used in the previous restoration gradually degraded.[17] The restoration revealed much of Roberts' original colour palette as well as background details previously not recognised. After the painting was cleaned, Lane claimed that he "could see the way the space and light flowed across the back reaches of the shearing shed in a way we really hadn't been aware of before."[4] The painting is currently displayed with the NGV's Australian art collection in the Ian Potter Centre at Federation Square in Melbourne.[16]
Critical reaction
Shearing the Rams is a work that will live, and a work by which Mr. Roberts' name will always be remembered.
The painting was initially generally well-received with Melbourne newspaper The Age reporting that it was a "most important work of a distinctly Australian character".[4] Among the many visitors to Grosvenor Chambers to see Shearing the Rams were "practical men from the bush". "It is right", they reportedly said when asked about the work. One journalist explained:[19]
They mean that the shed is a shed such as they know, the men are shearers and are really shearing, and the sheep are those they see in the show-yards and in stud flocks. The sun of the full Australian springtide streams through the broad low windows, and through the end door there is a glimpse of the open bush all aglow. "It is right"—there is nothing more to be said.
However, more conservative elements were critical of the work, with James Smith of The Argus, Melbourne's foremost art critic, commenting that the picture was too naturalistic: "art should be of all times, not of one time, of all places, not of one place", adding "we do not go to an art gallery to see how sheep are shorn".[11][20] In response, Roberts defended his choice of subject, stating that "by making art the perfect expression of one time and one place, it becomes for all time and of all places".[11]
In its 1890 review of the painting, The Argus wrote that the shearers, "native and to the manner born", present "the physical characteristics of Young Australia".[13] Art historian Chris Mcauliffe echoed this interpretation, calling the shearers "perfect specimens of manhood" who, in Roberts' vision, represented "the so-called 'coming man' of Australia".[21]
More recent critics have remarked that it presents an idealised and nostalgic view of pastoral life in Australia, with no sign of the conflict then taking place between the newly unionised shearers and the squatters, which culminated in the 1891 Australian shearers' strike. However, the painting would eventually be considered as "the definitive image of an emerging national identity."[11]
Legacy
Roberts in his later years
Shearing the Rams became one of the most well-known and loved paintings in the history of Australian art. The picture is widely recognised from "schoolbooks, calendars, jigsaw puzzles, matchboxes and postage stamps."[22] Parodies of the painting have been used in advertising campaigns for items such as hardware and underwear to express what one person described as "promoting what it means to be Australian today". The Australian cartoonist and social commentator Michael Leunig drew a reinterpration of the painting called Ramming the shears said to be "humourous[sic] and thought provoking in the questions it raises about Australian national identity".[23] The "self-consciously nationalist" image of young white men has been appropriated by other artists on behalf of several excluded groups, including women and immigrants. Nyoongar artist Dianne Jones made an Indigenous claim for inclusion by inserting her father and cousin into the iconic painting.[22]
It has been suggested that George Washington Lambert's 1921 work Weighing the fleece was conceived as a riposte to Shearing the Rams with Jim Davidson stating that "Certainly it could not be more different in spirit: instead of the celebration of strong masculine labour, [Weighing the fleece] endorses wealth and the social order."[24] The photorealist painter Marcus Beilby won the 1987 Sir John Sulman Prize with a painting that also depicts shearers at work, this time in a modern shed using machine shears with overhead gear. Beilby was consciously inspired by Shearing the Rams when creating his own updated version, and gave his work the name Crutching the ewes to differentiate it, despite the fact that it does not depict men crutching sheep but rather shearing them.[23][25]
The impact of Shearing of Rams can also be seen in Australian cinema. Shots of a shearing shed in The Squatter's Daughter (1933) bear a strong resemblance to the one in the painting.[26] The cinematography of the Australian New Wave film Sunday Too Far Away (1975), set on an outback sheep station, was heavily influenced by Shearing the Rams, among other Australian paintings.[27] The work inspired New Zealand author Stephen Daisley to write his 2015 historical novel Coming Rain.[28]
After the shearing shed featured in the painting burned down in a bushfire in 1965, a replica was constructed by the local community on a nearby reserve.[3] A re-enactment of the scene from the painting took place at North Tuppal station near Tocumwal, New South Wales in June 2010.[29] Another life-size rendition of Shearing the Rams occurred in 2011 at Melbourne's Federation Square as part of the NGV's 150th anniversary celebrations.[30]
The National Gallery of Victoria, popularly known as the NGV, is an art museum in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Founded in 1861, it is Australia's oldest and most visited art museum.
Australian art is any art made in or about Australia, or by Australians overseas, from prehistoric times to the present. This includes Aboriginal, Colonial, Landscape, Atelier, early-twentieth-century painters, print makers, photographers, and sculptors influenced by European modernism, Contemporary art. The visual arts have a long history in Australia, with evidence of Aboriginal art dating back at least 30,000 years. Australia has produced many notable artists of both Western and Indigenous Australian schools, including the late-19th-century Heidelberg School plein air painters, the Antipodeans, the Central Australian Hermannsburg School watercolourists, the Western Desert Art Movement and coeval examples of well-known High modernism and Postmodern art.
The Heidelberg School was an Australian art movement of the late 19th century. It has latterly been described as Australian impressionism.
Frederick McCubbin was an Australian artist, art teacher and prominent member of the Heidelberg School art movement, also known as Australian impressionism.
Thomas William Roberts was an English-born Australian artist and a key member of the Heidelberg School art movement, also known as Australian impressionism.
Sir Arthur Ernest Streeton was an Australian landscape painter and a leading member of the Heidelberg School, also known as Australian Impressionism.
Sheep shearing is the process by which the woollen fleece of a sheep is cut off. The person who removes the sheep's wool is called a shearer. Typically each adult sheep is shorn once each year. The annual shearing most often occurs in a shearing shed, a facility especially designed to process often hundreds and sometimes more than 3,000 sheep per day.
Emanuel Phillips Fox was an Australian impressionist painter. After studying at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne, Fox travelled to Paris to study in 1886. He remained in Europe until 1892, when he returned to Melbourne and led what is considered the second phase of the Heidelberg School, an impressionist art movement which had grown in the city during his absence. He spent over a decade in Europe in the early 20th century before finally settling in Melbourne, where he died.
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia is an art gallery that houses the Australian part of the art collection of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV).
The Box Hill artists' camp was a site in Box Hill, Victoria, Australia favoured by a group of plein air painters in the mid to late 1880s who later became associated with the Heidelberg School art movement, also known as Australian impressionism.
Marcus Charles Beilby, is an Australian realist painter. Beilby grew up in the Perth suburb of Mount Pleasant. He was educated at Applecross Senior High School and the Claremont Technical College, where he received a Diploma of Fine Arts (Painting) in 1975.
Artists' camps flourished around Sydney Harbour in the 1880s and 1890s, mainly in the Mosman area making it "Australia's most painted suburb", but died out after the first decade of the twentieth century. They developed as a result of the enthusiasm for painting en plein air fostered by the Barbizon and Impressionist movements in France in the second half of the 19th century, and were modelled on the artists' colonies which grew up in France and parts of the British Isles. In them, free-spirited young men gathered to live cheaply together in the open air, trying to capture the beauty of their surroundings in paintings and drawings. Financial stringency during the depression of the 1890s made life in the camps even more attractive for Australian artists trying to establish themselves in a difficult market.
The 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition was an art exhibition in Melbourne, Australia. It opened on 17 August 1889 at Buxton's Rooms on Swanston Street and featured 183 works, the majority of which were painted by Charles Conder, Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton of the Heidelberg School art movement, also known as Australian impressionism. The exhibition's name references the dimensions of most of the paintings—9 by 5 inches, the size of the cigar box lids upon which many of the works were painted—as well as the impressionist techniques employed by the artists.
The Golden Fleece, originally known as Shearing at Newstead, is an 1894 painting by the Australian artist Tom Roberts. The painting depicts sheep shearers plying their trade in a timber shearing shed at Newstead North, a sheep station near Inverell on the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales. The same shed is depicted in another of Roberts' works, Shearing Shed, Newstead (1894).
Footballer is a 1946 painting by Australian artist Sidney Nolan. It depicts an Australian rules footballer standing before a crowd of spectators at a football match. For many years the painting was thought to be a generic image of a footballer, however Nolan later revealed that the painting is based on Bill Mohr, a star player for the St Kilda Football Club during the 1930s.
Emma Minnie Boyd, born Emma Minnie à Beckett, was an Australian artist.
Jan Hendrik Scheltema, was a Dutch and later Australian painter who had a prolific, often strenuous, and arguably impressive career in Australia considering he was a non-British migrant artist without an international reputation on arrival. After working as a portrait painter in the Netherlands, he specialized in Australia as a livestock and landscape painter, making the livestock genre, particularly the foreground cattle genre, popular there. In Australia, he painted mainly in Victoria when living in Melbourne for almost 5 decades, even through its land boom depression of the 1890's, World War I and the Great Depression, where he also practiced as a painting and drawing teacher. He successfully lived off only his art and art teaching, at one stage owning a few houses, one of which he kept when retiring to Queensland.
Leon Pole was an Australian artist who was associated with the Heidelberg School art movement, also known as Australian Impressionism.
Weighing the Fleece is a 1921 painting by Australian artist George Washington Lambert. It is part of the collection of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.
Thomas Humphrey was a Scottish-born Australian artist and photographer who was associated with the Heidelberg School art movement, also known as Australian impressionism.
↑ "Notes and Comments". The Argus (Melbourne). 24 June 1890. p. 6. Retrieved 5 June 2020.
↑ Hawley, Janet (24 February 1996). "Tom Roberts Bailed Up". from the Sydney Morning Herald. Commercial Painter. Archived from the original on 6 July 2011. Retrieved 25 August 2009.
↑ McCaullife, Chris (4 June 2010). Shearing the Rams. Interview on Bush Telegraph, ABC Radio National.
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