Heidelberg School

The Heidelberg School was a late-nineteenth-century art movement in Australia, named after the village of Heidelberg near Melbourne, where a small group of artists went to work en plein air, in the open air and directly on site. The movement developed mainly in the 1880s and 1890s and is regarded as the first distinctly Australian school of painting, one that forged a national visual language. Its leading figures were Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder and Frederick McCubbin. Influenced by French plein-air painting and Impressionism, the artists sought to capture the peculiar bright light, heat, dust and pastel hues of the Australian bush, as well as scenes of rural and pioneer life. A key event of the movement was the 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition of 1889, which presented sketches painted on small wooden panels taken from cigar-box lids. The works of the Heidelberg painters, including monumental canvases about the labour of wool shearers and pioneers, became something like national icons and played a central role in shaping Australian cultural identity at the close of the colonial era.