Film - Shearing the Rams, National Gallery of Victoria

- Well, the X-ray, Michael. The X-ray of Shearing the Rams is obviously a pretty important document. If you could tell us about this picture, here.

- Well, this is a life-size print of the digital version of the X-ray. So it's not the original X-ray. It's an assemblage of about 40 plates, approximately.

-About 40 pieces of film about this big.

- That's right, yeah. Originally the painting was put on top of an X-ray machine, and the radiation was put up through. And depending on the thickness and the elemental weight of materials there we see or don't see, certain parts--

JOHN PAYNE: That's what gives us the image.

MICHAEL VARCOE-COCKS: That's right.

- It's a kind of transmission image through the whole structure of the painting.

- Yep. And sometimes it's not seeing forms. Sometimes it's seeing the absence of forms. So they are very difficult things to interpret. And this is by no means an easy X-ray to interpret.

- So what's significant about this one, though?

- The most obvious thing is this dramatic change to the figure.

- That's to this figure, here?

- That's right. It is hard--

JOHN PAYNE: The central shearer?

- Yep. So originally this figure we see here, this face and this back, is not the figure we see in the final painting. That's right.

- You can just see it, actually, in the texture through here.

- Yeah, you actually can just see a sense of the final face. So originally Roberts decided-- probably in the space, probably actually painting someone-- someone actually probably posed for him, within the shed. And he painted this figure a much higher back, leaning around a sheep.

JOHN PAYNE: It's a much more static pose. Yeah?

MICHAEL VARCOE-COCKS: It is. Yeah.

JOHN PAYNE: And much more of a solid right angle?

MICHAEL VARCOE-COCKS: That's right, yeah. And he's looked at it and make adjustments and decided to revise the composition slightly.

JOHN PAYNE: Can we say that he didn't have a beard?

MICHAEL VARCOE-COCKS: Yeah, I think we can definitely say at one point he didn't have a beard. I guess we don't know whether he later painted the beard on. But there's definitely a sense of a clean-shaven face, as opposed to-- the final image has the beard all the way through.

- So that's a full flesh tone.

- Right.

- That's just the flesh tones of the face. But here, you can see there is a beard, because it's not-- it doesn't have lead white in it, or flesh tone in it? Is that why we--

- That's right, yeah. It's probably most likely a combination of lead white and vermilion which is responding to the X-rays, which is basically, semi-opaque to the X-ray, so we get to image it there.

JOHN PAYNE: So he's not just changed his posture. He's probably also changed him as a type.

MICHAEL VARCOE-COCKS: That's right.

JOHN PAYNE: As a figure type.

MICHAEL VARCOE-COCKS: Yeah. I think he would have gone from an actual person to much more of a more generalized sense and more generalized depiction--

JOHN PAYNE: Of the bushman.

MICHAEL VARCOE-COCKS: Of the bushman. Of the hardworking Australian man at the labor-- at work. We also see-- quite well, actually-- we actually see the original hand.

- Oh, OK. And that's about here, in the painting?

- That's right. You can actually still see a glimpse of the original shears.

- That's here.

- Yep. And that's just there. So although he painted it out, he wasn't too particular about it. He was happy to leave some areas. Also, because of the change back through here-- this-- you know, the back leg of the shearer-- he had to readjust some of these areas up here. Particularly around--

- These passages in the painting itself?

- Yeah. It's quite a critical part. This is an old repair. A lead-white repair, most likely.

JOHN PAYNE: That's on the back of the canvas, in fact, not on the front.

MICHAEL VARCOE-COCKS: On the back of the canvas, yeah.

JOHN PAYNE: Because we don't see that, do we--

MICHAEL VARCOE-COCKS: No, it's hidden away.

JOHN PAYNE: --in the painting? It's actually on the back. Yeah.

- It's a sort of an artifact that's left. Of course, we also see the tacks that are holding the canvas onto its support.

JOHN PAYNE: So they're the white-- and they show up because they're steel.

- Steel. That's right. Solid metal. And then there's other things. We get to see which comes first and what's painted later.

- You talked about these poles, as well. And there's a significance about that.

- That's right. You can really see quite clearly, here, that there's a strong response in the X-ray. Whereas given that the poles are painted quite dark, you can find similar areas, perhaps like through here, which-- that's the response you'd perhaps expect. But realistically the response is much more close to the paleness of--

JOHN PAYNE: So what you're saying is that the color we see here is, in fact, very like this, in the painting that we see. But in the X-ray, obviously the X-ray doesn't give us the same image for here as it does for here. So the poles, in fact, start out as a different color. Much paler poles.

MICHAEL VARCOE-COCKS: That was, like, the point of interest to me. So we pursued it further, but we had to use various methods of technical examination to find that originally these poles were actually painted a slightly warm grey color. So that's quite a major change in the composition.

JOHN PAYNE: Sure.

- So he would painted them to completion. Because the poles actually come down through-- or they start to come down through the figures-- we know that the architecture went in first.

- OK, that's interesting. So he's actually put the poles in place before this shearer even goes in place.

- That's right, yeah. Even in the first version. So he's blocking it in. That said, we can tell also that he's painted around the sheep. So this form was put in first. Or at least spaced out. He must have sort of mapped it out.

- So he leaves kind of reserve.

- Reserve, yeah.

- Is that what you're saying?

MICHAEL VARCOE-COCKS: Yeah. Yeah, we had no sense that he drew the composition with charcoal or anything like that. We can't actually confirm or-- well, we just can't confirm that. But I do see, under various forms of examination, him drawing in-- Roberts drawing in the paint, same with a brush. And quite a quick and fast response to what he's seeing in front of him.

- It's an interesting idea, though, that you could paint something perhaps as planned as this directly on the surface.

- Yeah. It's important for him. And this is actually-- this is sort of a-- it's almost a political statement, at the time. There's no reason why he had to construct or paint this within the shed.

But he's so interested, as all the young painters of the time-- you know, the turn of the 1880s and 1890s-- with the effects of light. And in particular the effect of Australian light on color. And so that's what he's trying to capture. You can't do that in the studio, in  an enclosed, artificial light. And so he's actually doing it in front of the figures.

- But I'm nevertheless interested in the idea about how you actually build the picture on the canvas. You know, and if we can't see underdrawing. I mean, obviously, there may be underdrawing there. We just can't reveal it.

- That's a possibility.

- But it's also possible that he sort of paints or draws the picture into place with a brush, rather than with something else.

- We know he did up to 80 or 90 sketches in the shed first, before he even began the canvas. So he did a lot of thinking-- a lot of laying down on paper ideas and concepts. They're small portraits, as well as--

JOHN PAYNE: So it's probably fairly well fixed in his head, in fact, what he wants to do. Which would allow you to come to the canvas fairly directly, than.

MICHAEL VARCOE-COCKS: Yeah.

JOHN PAYNE: Yeah?

MICHAEL VARCOE-COCKS: But nevertheless, he goes back and makes adjustments and makes changes-- and dramatic changes, too.

- Yeah,  because this is serious. I mean, (LAUGHING) this is finished, isn't it?

- That's right.

- And then it's changed.

- And same with this. And so what he's doing is what the viewer does. He's responding to the picture, himself, as an artist, and making the same sort of adjustments that probably other art historians will make, themselves. So it's a dual process, there. He's the maker, but he's also the viewer, for a period of time. Sort of nice to think.

It's hard to see, but in actual fact there's a few other figures that have changed, as well. This figure, back here--

- That you only see in the X-ray, as a change.

- Yeah. Oh-- that's right.

- So there's a shift in the head, here.

- Yeah. Yeah. And there's one surviving sketch-- is in a drawing, a work on paper of gouache and charcoal which Roberts did. And he actually depicts this figure in a slightly different pose. And we now know that's the same pose that originally he painted in before he made the adjustment.

The pose was originally with the head back further, pulling on his braces. Probably in a stretching sort of pose. You know, the strain of hard work and hard labor. But quite possibly, though, that figure, along with the figure who's drinking out of the billy.

- That's this one, here?

- Yeah. I think the form would have been replicated too much. And so he had to sort of create a difference. They sort of form a V. They come down through here-- which, of course, is an area of interest for Roberts, formally, because this is the intersection, here, of all the orthogonals.

- It's the focal point.

- Point of perspective. And a lot of people have talked about this composition being constructed around triangles, as well. These sort of pyramid forms that sort of come up in various ways and are replicated through-- come down. You can see them in various parts of the picture.

And he's just relying on a methodology he would have learnt as part of the formal training he had, both in Australia and briefly overseas. So it's a sort of academic instruction.

- Because they're fairly old ideas. Or fairly-- you know, not well established ideas, that idea of building blocks of color, like the blues--

- That's right.

- --kind of triangle.

- Yeah. Well, even when Roberts was-- before he went to the national gallery school, he was part of the schools of design. And the classes that he would have done there would have been geometric drawing and construction and things like that.

- So he'd be quite aware-- quite formally aware-- of formal construction of pictures.

- Yeah, definitely. Definitely. As well as referencing over artists who'd been before him. And thinking about successful compositions established through time, all the way back to the 15th century and before. Although they were sort of isolated in Australia, from a point of view of geography, they   weren't isolated in terms of intellectual ideas. And they pursued it. And perhaps, in some ways, they  were even more keen to pursue those ideas.

- And of course he travels to and fro from Europe to Australia, as well, doesn't he, Roberts?

MICHAEL VARCOE-COCKS: That's right. Yeah. Yeah, by the time he paints this picture, he's already spent time overseas. He's trained in some important academies overseas, and he's traveled around. He's almost accidentally run into some people in Spain who were studying in Paris who were directly interested in impressionism. And he brought those ideas back to Australia.