The Golden Fleece
Tom Roberts (1856 to 1931) · 1894
Inside a timber shearing shed, sunlight pours through the open doors onto a line of men bent over sheep, their shirts white against the dark of the shed, the fleeces spread on the boards like gold. A boy in the foreground gathers wool, a man at the right holds up a finished fleece for the owner to inspect, and beyond the shearers you can see the yards and the pale summer light of the tablelands. The painting is large and quiet and full of work; it is one of the most familiar images in Australian art.
Tom Roberts painted it at Newstead, a sheep station near Inverell in northern New South Wales, working in the shed while the shearing was on. He had painted a similar subject, Shearing the Rams, in Victoria a few years earlier, but here the composition is more formal, the row of shearers set in a rhythm that recalls a frieze. Look at the handling of light: the doorway is a rectangle of bright white, the interior is built in warm browns, and every face and forearm is caught with a few strokes. The station owner, Duncan Anderson, looks over the shoulder of the man on the right.
Roberts first called the picture Shearing at Newstead, then renamed it after the golden fleece of Greek myth, turning a scene of labour into a national image of the wealth that wool brought to the colonies. The gallery bought it in 1894, the year it was painted, and it has hung here ever since. It belongs to the group of works by Roberts, Streeton and McCubbin, the Heidelberg school, that gave Australians their first images of themselves and their light, and it is the painting most visitors to the Grand Courts come to see.
Did You Know? Roberts painted it on the spot inside a working shearing shed at Newstead station while the shearing was under way.
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