Focus on The Golden Fleece (painting) and explore the History.
Roberts was born in Dorchester, England, in the year 1856. After the death of his father, Richard Roberts, he migrated to Melbourne, Australia, with his mother and two siblings in 1869. He began studying art at the Collingwood and Carlton artisans' schools of design in 1873 and in 1874 he joined the National Gallery School.The Golden Fleece is the second sheep shearing themed painting in a series done by Tom Roberts. In 1890, four years prior to the painting of The Golden Fleece, Roberts expressed in a letter to The Argus, a Melbourne-based newspaper, his desire to create a shearing themed piece, writing: 'being in the bush and feeling the delight and fascination of the great pastoral life and work I have tried to express it’. This is the same year that he composed the piece of work which was titled Shearing the Rams. This painting depicted the inside of the shearing shed at Brockelsby a sheep station in the Riverina region of New South Wales. Roberts was living in Melbourne at the time of the composition. After the completion of the piece, the oil on canvas painting was exhibited in Roberts’ Collins street studio in Melbourne, and it was Roberts’ hope that he could sell it to the National Gallery of Victoria. There was demand for the painting to enter public galleries, as one Sydney corresponder writes "if our national gallery trustees were in the least patriotic, they would purchase it." However, there was opposition from key members in the gallery and it therefore was sold to a local stock agent named Edmund Trenchard who offered to buy it privately for 350 guineas. Roberts' intention was to pay homage to Australia's pastoral culture through his artwork. He said in reference to Shearing the Rams.It seems to me that one of the best words spoken to an artist is "Paint what you love, and love what you paint," and on that I have worked: and so it came that being in the bush and feeling the delight and fascination of the great pastoral life and work I have tried to express it [...] So lying on wool-bales ... it seemed that I had there the best expression of my subject, a subject noble and worthy enough if I could express the meaning and spirit—of strong masculine labour, the patience of the animals whose year's growth is being stripped from them for man's use and the great human interest in the whole scene
In 1891, a year after selling Shearing the Rams, Tom Roberts moved to Sydney.  He was still disappointed that the first of his pastoral themed paintings had not being taken up by the National Art Gallery of Victoria and decided that he would begin a second work of a similar theme. It was in the year 1893 that he first visited the woolshed owned by his friend Duncan Anderson, the Newstead North Station, in northern New South Wales near Inverell. It was here that Roberts set up and painted 'en plein air' the second in his sheep shearing themed series of paintings, 'The Golden Fleece'. Roberts used live models who posed in the shearing shed for him to base the figures in the painting off, these models were the real employees of the shearing shed in Newstead, most of the models have since been identified and their names known by locals and family members in Inverell.The owner and manager of the shed, Duncan Anderson, is also included in the painting, he is the non-labouring figure standing to the far left wearing a suit and a hat that shadows over his face. It took Roberts from February to May 1984, approximately 4 months, to complete the painting, after which it was exhibited in New South Wales at the Fifteenth Annual Exhibition of the Art Society of New South Wales at the York Street Skating Rink, in September 1894. The same year of its completion and exhibition, the painting was scouted and purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales where it can be seen today.
Roberts painted 3 new artworks while staying at the Anderson family's station in Newport, including The Golden Fleece and other well known Australian Impressionist artworks such as Bailed Up and Shearing Shed, Newstead.
Bailed Up 1894 Australia Art Gallery of New South Wales shearing shed station Inverell Shearing the Rams sheep station National Gallery of Victoria Sydney Tom Roberts Riverina Golden Fleece Shearing Shed, Newstead