ArtBubs | AGWA Historical: Shearing the rams

ArtBubs is a great way for parents with bubs to get together for a mid-week art outing.

Join our Gallery Guide and other parents for a tour of Tom Roberts’ Shearing the rams display, followed by coffee, cake, and lively conversation.

Prams/baby carriers and babies up to one year old welcome! Baby change facilities available.

AGWA is home for the next few months to one of Australia’s iconic colonial-era paintings. Tom Roberts’ Shearing the rams on loan from the National Gallery of Victoria until late July, in return for the loan of one of AGWA’s much-loved paintings, Droving into the light, which features in the NGV exhibition Hans and Nora Heysen: Two Generations of Australian Art.

Shearing the rams hangs alongside AGWA’s own Down on his luck by Frederick McCubbin, and gives you a rare opportunity to see these two great nationalistic narrative paintings side-by-side. Both works take rural subject matter as the starting point for their images of Australian identity, but Roberts presents a positive vision of the pastoral industry, far removed from McCubbin’s image of a struggling pioneer.