Tom Roberts and the Curlew Camp: Mosman’s Hidden Role in Australian Impressionism
- Alec Smart
- Jul 4
- 8 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
Before the galleries and fame, Tom Roberts lived in a tent at Mosman’s Curlew Camp, shaping Australian art history with bold brushstrokes and Bohemian grit.
By Alec Smart
Tom Roberts, acclaimed landscape and portrait painter, was a highly influential figure in Australian art history. He also lived for five years beneath a canvas sheet in the bush on the south-eastern shore of Little Sirius Cove, Mosman (below what is now Sydney Taronga Zoo).
Roberts was nicknamed ‘Bulldog’ by his friends due to his dogged determination and tenacity, and considering what he achieved in his life and the influence he had on Australian art, it was a well-earned moniker. Some of his better-known works have featured in important publications, and several generations of Australians grew up with reprints of his works on their school walls.
Curlew Camp, Mosman
The ramshackle bushland site on Little Sirius Cove where Roberts nurtured his talent (and encouraged fellow creatives), became famous as the Curlew Camp. Until his arrival, it consisted of a collection of tents on the rocky foreshore, established by city merchant Reuben Brasch and his brothers in 1890 for weekend recreation, like fishing and swimming. The Brasch families would row over from the City opposite.
Brasch was a wealthy clothing manufacturer who owned Hyde Park Corner, a three-storey department store at the junction of Oxford St and Wentworth Ave, Surry Hills (opposite the southern corner of Hyde Park). He encouraged the itinerant artists who drifted into his weekend campsite and provided them with easels, paints, brushes and other art supplies.
Tom Roberts, after initially camping on the Sirius Cove shoreline, set up base at Curlew in 1891 with his friend and Melbourne studio-mate Arthur Streeton, both of them having recently relocated to Sydney to seek new opportunities.
They resided there in the open-air with limited amenities, cohabiting with a Bohemian, transient bunch of artistic personalities. Between them they painted numerous seafront locations around the harbour, many of which have become world-famous (and contributed to Mosman and the surrounding foreshores being one of the most-painted suburbs in Australia).
Many of the Curlew crew chose this feral, rent-free lifestyle because of the financial constraints and widespread unemployment that were caused by the 1890s economic depression.
However, it was not all hardship - they reportedly set up a billiards table under one marquee, and the more established residents pooled their varying incomes to employ a camp cook plus a young lad to keep the premises clean.
At Curlew Camp, Roberts and Streeton imparted their enthusiasm for painting landscapes from life, which they’d developed in artists’ camps in Box Hill and Victoria.
The pair were leading members of the Heidelberg School, a late 19th century Australian arts’ coalition that was heavily inspired by ‘Impressionism’ and ‘Barbizon’, both avant-garde French art trends.
The ‘school’ was named after the Melbourne suburb of Heidelberg, 11km north-east of the city centre, where Australia’s burgeoning Impressionist arts movement developed.
Plein-Air Painting
Through Roberts’ and Streeton’s zeal, many of the Curlew Camp occupants were inspired by what was termed Plein-Air Painting, an emerging style of painting natural, outdoor scenes whilst in-situ, largely influenced by Impressionism.
Between them, they developed a distinct Australian style that captured and celebrated hard work and harsh sunlight in rural environs that characterised the Curlew Camp’s creations.
Artists’ Network describes Plein-Air Art as “leaving the four walls of your studio behind and experiencing painting and drawing in the landscape. The practice goes back for centuries but was truly made into an art form by the French Impressionists.
“Their desire to paint light and its changing, ephemeral qualities, coupled with the creation of transportable paint tubes and the box easel … allowed artists the freedom to paint “en plein air,” which is the French expression for ‘in the open air’.”
Impressionism is a 19th century art movement historically attributed to venerable French painters Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir and others, a network of independent artists who were based in Paris in the 1860s-70s.
The term ‘Impressionism’ derives from the title of an 1872 Claude Monet oil painting, Impression, Soleil Levant (Impression, Sunrise). This progressive amalgam of French painters was initially mocked by the conservative arts establishment, such as the Académie des Beaux-Arts.
The latter preferred religious devotional work and formal portraits with precise brushstrokes over the unrestrained Impressionist pieces, in which bold colours often bled into each other, creating a blurry effect.
Eventually, their artworks were hailed as revolutionary and Impressionism made a permanent impression on the world’s visual arts, music and literature. Even the likes of Vincent Van Gogh drew inspiration from the techniques.
The avant-garde medium transcended national boundaries and dispersed across the world to directly influence Tom Roberts and other key personalities at the Curlew Camp, such as Arthur Streeton, Sydney Long and A. Henry Fullwood, as well as musicians and poets visiting there (and the other makeshift artists’ camps in Sydney and Melbourne at the latter end of the 19th Century).
Another artist associated with the Curlew Camp was Bulletin illustrator Frank P Mahony, who drew the book covers for renowned Australian authors Henry Lawson and Ethel Pedley - While the Billy Boils and Dot and the Kangaroo, respectively.
Euroka Balmoral Camp
Curlew Camp, despite its importance to Australian art history – principally due to the presence of Roberts and Streeton – was neither the only nor the first artists’ colony in Sydney.
According to the Dictionary of Sydney: “Artists' camps flourished around Sydney Harbour, mainly in the Mosman area, in the 1880s and 1890s, dying out after the first decade of the twentieth century…. They were modelled on the artists' colonies which grew up in France and parts of the British Isles. In them, free-spirited young men gathered to live cheaply together in the open air, trying to capture the beauty of their surroundings in paintings and drawings.
“Financial stringency during the depression of the 1890s made life in the camps even more attractive for Australian artists trying to establish themselves in a difficult market.”
Another prominent artists’ encampment was ‘Euroka’ on the north Balmoral seafront by Edwards Beach. It evolved around a four-room marquee weekender erected by Bulletin magazine cartoonist Livingston Hopkins (Hop) in 1883 on a 50-acre allotment he leased.
The artists camped in what is now Balmoral Reserve, at the end of Awaba St, and drifted into the camp after a 3km trek from the ferry wharf in Mosman Bay, treble the distance of the Curlew Camp to the south-west, which was established seven years later.
Another artist associated with the Heidelberg School in Melbourne, painter, teacher and first President of the Art Society of NSW, Julian Ashton, resided awhile at the Balmoral Euroka camp. In 1890 he founded the prestigious Julian Ashton Art School academy in The Rocks.
Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island and Kidnapped, is known to have spent a night camped at Euroka in March 1893.
Although many women were associated with the Mosman and Balmoral artists’ camps, none stayed overnight due to the prevailing moral standards of the time. However, several aspiring female artists that later distinguished themselves were regular visitors to Curlew, among them Hilda Rix Nicholas and Ethel Carrick.
Who was Tom Roberts?
Roberts, born in Dorchester, England, in 1856, arrived in Australia at the age of 13 with his family to stay with relatives, following the death of his father.
During his teenage years, he worked in a studio as a photographer’s assistant, then in 1871 he began part-time art classes under influential tutors, the Swiss Louis Buvelot and Austrian Joseph Eugene von Guérard, both detailed landscape painters.
In 1874, he took art classes at the National Gallery of Victoria School, taught by distinguished Impressionist artist and teacher Frederick McCubbin. In 1881, he returned to Britain and studied at the Royal Academy of Art in London, whilst undertaking foreign treks to France, Spain and Venice.
It was during this period that he transitioned stylistically into the creative promise of the Impressionists, and in 1885 he returned to Melbourne inspired and highly motivated.
In 1888, with his old mentor McCubbin, the duo established an artists’ camp in an idyllic location Roberts discovered in Box Hill, 20km from the city. A relatively recent rail extension and station had been constructed, making this beautiful region more accessible.
Visiting Sydney in 1888, Roberts met fellow Briton Charles Conder, who was also inspired by the Plein-Air movement then gathering momentum, and after painting a few seaside locations together, Roberts returned to Melbourne, with Conder following soon afterwards.
Roberts, Conder and Arthur Streeton established a shared studio together in the city, and often travelled together to remote regions to paint.
Second and third artists’ encampments followed - in Heidelberg (where they adopted the name that will forever define them) and at Mentone Beach in Port Phillip Bay, attracting enthusiastic recruits who also pursued and honed their Plein-Air painting styles.
The trio came to be regarded as the core members leading the Heidelberg School movement.
After helping coordinate a major exhibition of contemporary Impressionist works in Melbourne in August 1889, titled 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition, Roberts - now aged 35 - and his 24-year-old accomplice Arthur Streeton, moved north to the Curlew Camp in Sydney. The rest, as they say, is history.
Roberts left the Curlew Camp in 1896 to marry his fiancé, Lillie Williamson, and they set up home together in Balmain where their son Caleb was born.
The duo moved to London in 1903, and Roberts later worked as a hospital orderly during the First World War. The British period of their life was relatively uninspiring for Roberts, with few artworks created. His wife Lillie was the main income earner.
In 1914, the couple returned to Australia and built a home in Kallista on the eastern outskirts of Melbourne. Lillie died in 1928, and Roberts succumbed to cancer in 1931, not long after remarrying.
Some of Tom Roberts’ artworks have become classics and are venerated among iconic tableaus that encapsulate the pre- and post-1900 Federation era of Australian rural life.
His most famous works include A Break Away! (1891), Shearing The Rams (1888-90), Coming South (1885-86), In A Corner Of The Macintyre (1895) and Bailed Up (1895).
Although reprints of his fading artworks seldom grace school walls as they once did, Roberts’ influence on Australian landscape painting is undeniable.
Roberts’ 1895 composition, Bailed Up, featuring a passenger coach being halted at gunpoint by bushrangers, was sketched in Inverell, NSW, utilising a stagecoach mounted on a platform.
The driver, Silent Bob Bates, who provided advice on the composition, had genuinely been held up and robbed whilst transporting passengers three decades earlier by infamous bushranger Captain Thunderbolt.
The Mosman Art Trail is a 10km trek via a series of 12 renowned artworks from 1885 – 2015, reproduced where they were originally created. The walk passes through some of the most picturesque seafront locations in the 2088 postal district to view the pieces in situ.
As previously featured on Neighbourhood Media, several of the Curlew Camp occupants’ works are among those on the route.
More details at Mosman Art Gallery: www.mosmanartgallery.org.au
Curlew Camp Exhibition
Mosman Art Gallery are hosting an exhibition of Curlew Camp artworks featuring paintings from the period (including Tom Roberts) and newly-commissioned pieces by artists influenced by the site, heritage and creative personalities living there.
It’s on until 17 August 2025.
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