Tom Roberts

A Summer Morning Tiff 1886

Born in Dorchester, England, Tom Roberts (1856–1931) migrated to Australia with his family in 1869. His early training took place mainly at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, before spending the years 1881–85 abroad, enrolling in the Royal Academy SchooI, London. He was deeply impressed by the work of James McNeill Whistler, whose subtle, evocative sketches he displayed in his well-publicised exhibition 'Notes – Harmonies – Nocturnes', in London in May 1884. During this period, Roberts also toured Spain, Italy and France, and briefly attended the Académie Julian in Paris.

Returning to Melbourne, Roberts established a plein-air artists' camp at Box Hill, and he and his colleagues were also associated with a number of other significant sites for plein-air painting in Melbourne and Sydney during the 1880s and 1890s. In 1903, he returned to England and continued to work, becoming vice president of the Chelsea Arts Club. He visited Australia during 1919 and 1920, and in 1923 he returned to Australia.

A Summer Morning Tiff 1886 is a masterful study of domestic interaction set within a quintessentially Australian landscape. It captures the intense heat and bright sunlight of a summer’s morning, positioning the downcast young woman, dressed in white, amidst a stand of young eucalyptus trees. Her beau is already in the background, moving away with his horse into the dense bush. Roberts is known to have painted several versions of a scene of a lovers’ quarrel set in the Australian bush.