습격당하다

By the time Roberts set up here in 1895, the highway robbery he was painting had all but vanished from these roads. He was staying at Newstead station in northern New South Wales, and to get the light and the scale of the gum trees right he had the family build him a platform in a tree on the slope below the road, so his eye sat exactly at coach height. The hold-up he staged was a memory more than a threat, drawn from the local legend of Fred Ward, the bushranger known as Captain Thunderbolt. Roberts came back to the canvas in 1927 and simplified it, flattening the bush into the broad, calm bands of colour you see now.