Charcoal burners

Roberts had just come back to Australia from art school in London, and in 1886 he and his friend, the painter Frederick McCubbin, pitched a camp at Box Hill, then bush on the edge of Melbourne. Working outdoors from life, the two were beginning what became Australian Impressionism. This canvas came out of those weeks, showing three men splitting and stacking timber to burn into charcoal, caught in dry light and dusty scrub colours rather than any imported green. Roberts wanted plain rural labour taken seriously as a subject. The picture later had an adventure of its own. It was stolen from the Art Gallery of Ballarat in 1978 and recovered a year later, after a ransom, from a park in Sydney, and it hangs in Ballarat still.