Roberts first introduces his audience to the social tensions in his large figure study Shearing the Rams which he began to work on during the time he spent at Brocklesby. The final version of it was not completed until 1890, yet it is by looking at the transition from the first sketches to the finished product that we can see how the concurrent labor movement events influenced him and shaped his work. In preparation for the creation of Shearing the Rams, Roberts reported himself to have made between seventy and eighty sketches of “the light, the atmosphere, the sheep, the men and the work” (qtd City Bushmen 107). Sketch of a Shearer (1889) is a tall, harshly rectangular piece depicting the back and side of a shearer, bent over in his work. The way in which Roberts positions this worker within the sketch and in relation to the sheep being shorn is crucial to understanding its full significance. First of all, the man occupies the entirety of the frame, forcing the audience to focus on him as opposed to his surroundings. The enlarged position of the man emphasizes the importance Roberts placed on the workers and exemplifies his concern with the working man’s cause. In addition, with the man bent down, mid-shear, he creates a right angle between his legs and his back, allowing his painfully hard-working position to be further accentuated by the upper-left-corner angle of the frame. Moreover, by presenting the illustration of the shearer from the back viewpoint, Roberts creates an almost entire eclipse of the sheep, pronouncing the man in the sketch clearly as his first and foremost concern. While it is apparent that the sketch is a depiction of the “strong masculine labor” towards which Roberts was striving, the position of the shearer visibly alludes to his bias towards the plight of the working man.
Image:
Roberts, Tom. Sketch of a Shearer. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.