Tom Roberts - The Break Away!

The Break Away! - 1891

Art Gallery of South Australia - Adelaide - Australia

Born in Dorchester, England, Thomas William Roberts (1856-1931) emigrated with his widowed mother to Australia in 1869, where they settled in a suburb in Melbourne. He became a photographer’s assistant, a job he kept for ten years, while studying art at night under Louis Buvelo and befriending others who were to become prominent artists. He returned to England for a full-time art study, from 1881-84, and became the first major Australian painter to study at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, which he did for three years before returning to the south Hemisphere in 1885 to dedicate himself to painting the light and color of Australian bush. "Shearing the Rams" and "Break Away!" are among his best known works. Many of Robert’s comtemporaries considered the life of ordinary Australians an unfit subject for “fine” art, but his studies of life in the bush were loved by subsequent generations of Australians for their dignified and affectionate depiction of working people. A Break Away! Shows a tumultuous chase, as the drover charges headlong down a steep slope in a cloud of dust after the panic-stricken, escaped sheep. Whether it was sheepshearing, wood splitting, or droving, Roberts’s paintings are heartfelt, exhilarating works.
Source: Wikipedia, Terry Sanderson, net