The merging of residual academic ideals with a strong egalitarianism was characteristic of Roberts, in whom a political instinct was well developed. (He probably discussed the widespread strikes of the day with the man at Newstead who later joined the Lane expedition to Paraguay.) Certainly he was active in art politics, both in Melbourne and in Sydney, being elected president of the radical Artists’ Societies in each. Roberts constantly sought to improve the status of Australian art and Australian artists. It was an uphill battle: when his (undistinguished) portrait of Alderman Samuel Amess was unveiled, it seemed only the artist was not invited. (Clearly Amess was a very dull man.) Again, when the 9 x 5 Exhibition took place in 1889, the influential critic James Smith turned up his nose at these ‘unfinished’ daubings on cigar-box lids: Roberts, Conder, and McCubbin replied to defend their ‘impressions’, attacking ‘safe mediocrity’ and stating ‘their faith in the possibility of developing ‘what we believe· will be a great school of painting in Australia’. But it was no use. Smith’s counsel prevailed: it the National Gallery of Victoria, with the result that – unlike Perth and Sydney – the Gallery did not buy a Roberts until 1920, and no major one until Shearing the Rams in 1932. By then Tom Roberts was dead.

Like so many figures in Australian history, Roberts has not been well served by the subsequent literature. His friend R.H. Croll edited Streeton’s letters to Roberts, and compiled a biography: its value lies in the reminiscences of various contemporaries recorded whole. Scholars have therefore plundered it extensively, simultaneously deploring its inadequacies. Virginia Spate’s monograph (1972) is excellent in its exposition of the paintings, but somewhat crimped in her handling of Roberts’ life and, it must be said, of the sources in Croll. What then do the present volumes offer?

The first answer must be, a listing of 770 paintings and drawings – three hundred more than the 481 listed in Spate. And most of these are reproduced in the second of the two volumes, the particulars set forth, in the systematic manner of catalogues raisonné, in the first; hence they may be conveniently consulted side by side. The next question is simply how assiduous has Helen Topliss been in searching out Roberts’ oeuvre? Has she been able to find the two lost paintings discussed by Spate: Circe (1899) and End to a Career, an Old Scrubcutter (1888)? The immediate answer, alas, is no, although in the former case she offers the explanation that Roberts probably took the painting with him to England in 1903 (so it may still be there); while in the latter she reproduces the original catalogue illustration mentioned in Spate. Again, there are a considerable number of paintings that have popped up like porpoises in auction rooms over the last ten to fifteen years, only to disappear without trace; but this undoubtedly says more about the art market and its ways than it does about Topliss as a cataloguer. However, the large number of Tasmanian paintings she has either not been able to locate or to see suggests that she didn’t go there; if she had, she would know that Penguin Island is not in Tasmania but in Anatole France. One also wonders about nos 609–10, which seem remarkably similar, even to the vehicle coming round the bend; yet one is entitled The Little Train at Belgrave, the other Fog on the Road to Yea. Despite these quibbles, there is abundant reason to be grateful to Helen Topliss for what she has given us, much of it hitherto secreted in private collections.

Both the scale of Roberts’ ambition and the vagaries of reputation are at once evident. Roberts sought to paint a group of representative Australian notables, and by 1900 had produced panels of twenty-three eminent politicians, musicians, and, other public figures. He hoped to sell them as a collection, but was disappointed. Today, eighty-five years later, five have seemingly disappeared altogether; another was found in an antique shop twenty years ago. Peculiarly aware of the importance of recording our history, Roberts vainly urged Alfred Deakin to establish a National Portrait Gallery and was driven to take up the challenge of the ‘Big Picture’, the opening of the first Federal Parliament in Melbourne in 1901. One of the splendid illustrations in this book has him awkwardly confronting the huge canvas from a stool, the empty cavernous interior of the Exhibition Buildings stretching beyond.

The picture was to break him. It brought neither the success nor the commissions he hoped for, and, having travelled with it back to England, he loitered there in the hope of gaining recognition by the Royal Academy. It was an exercise in misplaced persistence. Meanwhile his reputation in Australia went into eclipse: even McCubbin described him in 1916 as a mere sojourner. Coming back permanently in 1923, Roberts increasingly sought refuge in Tasmania, at no great distance from where another successful painter in his sixties, John Glover, had buried himself a century before. A portrait was acquired by the Geelong Art Gallery in 1924, but, as Topliss notes, it came to be recorded as ‘lost’. In 1976, when another Roberts disappeared from the Manly Art Gallery, there was no doubt about it: The Flower Sellers had been stolen.

My main regret about this catalogue is that the introductory essay is too short: Topliss has written ably about Tom Roberts’s Aboriginal portraits in Seeing the First Australians, a volume edited by the Donaldsons which appeared earlier this year, while her 1984 Monash exhibition and catalogue of the plein-air movement around Melbourne was quite masterly; both are given relatively short shrift here. At the same time, while she provides an excellent analysis of the influences and non-influences upon the Heidelberg School, it seems to me that in the end it must be conceded that they were impressionists, albeit of quite a different and lesser kind from the French variety. What was new and shared by both was a concern with light: at the risk of simplification, in France this liberated the artist from the tyranny of landscape, whereas in Australia it provided a way into it. How different was the Heidelberg attitude from that of Marcus Clarke, scarcely a generation before! Roberts would have nothing of the Bush’s melancholy. ‘Witchery – that’s the word. The Australian bush has a Witchery all its own’. It had become immediate: masterful young men would handle it with deft strokes and bold colours. Thus even when the vision faded, the memory persisted: Conder, in Paris, dreamed not so much of Montparnasse as of Box Hill, while Roberts’ last painting was an idealised, sylphic vision of one of the artists’ camps forty years before. Heidelberg was soaked in nostalgia, the concomitant of a sense of its own fragility. Significantly, Roberts in Shearing the Rams painted in hand shears, rather than the mechanical ones actually used by the men; a yearning for vanished simplicities disguised itself as concern for historical record.

Finally, some remarks about the production. The books are sumptuous and beautifully produced, but not unblemished. Quite literally: something has gone terribly wrong with the illustration of The Flower Sellers, which is a great pity given the painting’s disappearance. There are minor errors, often in the French titles, while the London Grosvenor Gallery certainly existed before 1887. More importantly, there is a great deal of repetition between the introduction and the chronology, compounded by the expansive listings. A sharp editorial eye would have helped here, as it certainly would have on Vol I, p 15: there Oxford University Press has seemingly given its imprimatur to the possessive ‘it’s’, one of the nervous tics of the ubiquitous apostrophe as it dances its way out of the language.