Roberts | Shearing the Rams

About Shearing the Rams by Tom Roberts

Tom Roberts painted Shearing the Rams across the summers of 1888 and 1889 in a woolshed at Brocklesby Station, near Corowa on the Murray, finishing it in his Melbourne studio in 1890. He went out there specifically to do it, boarded on the property, and worked from the shearers themselves.

He was explicit about why. Roberts wanted, in his words, to paint the great pastoral life and work of Australia — to give the country's own labour the scale and seriousness that European painting reserved for history and myth. Nobody had really done that here. He chose a shed full of men in singlets with hand blades and made a canvas nearly two metres wide out of it.

The timing was not accidental either. Blade shearing was about to be swept away by machines, and Roberts knew it. The small boy at the centre is the tar boy, whose job was to dab tar on any sheep the blades cut. Critics at the time were unsure what to make of a picture with no story in it. It now hangs in the National Gallery of Victoria and is one of the most recognised images in Australian art.

Own a hand-painted Shearing the Rams

The whole picture is built inside a very narrow band of colour. A shearing shed is timber, wool, dust and skin — ochres, tans, dusty pinks and greys — and Roberts had to make an entire crowded scene legible using almost nothing else, separating one man from the next by the smallest shifts in warm tone. Narrow tonal ranges are exactly where reproduction struggles: compress them even slightly and the close values collapse into each other, so the shed turns muddy and the figures start to merge. Mixed and laid down by hand in oils, those small distinctions survive, and you can read the depth of the shed the way Roberts painted it.

• A range of sizes — choose yours above. The original is wide, and the composition needs that width to hold the length of the shed.
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