Australian Masters: Heidelberg School Prints

Plein air painting around Melbourne in the 1880s

Some painters carried their easels outdoors around Melbourne in the 1880s and 1890s. The name Heidelberg School stuck. Their subject was passing light and what it did to colour, which is why the work is usually called Australian impressionism.

In 1885 Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Louis Abrahams set up an artists' camp at Box Hill. Others worked the countryside east of Melbourne, around Heidelberg, and later around Sydney. They painted daily life instead of grand history.

The 9 by 5 exhibition and its cigar-box lids

In August 1889 the group took over Buxton's Rooms in Swanston Street, Melbourne, for the 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition. Most works were painted on wooden cigar-box lids about 9 by 5 inches, which gave the show its name. Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder supplied most of them.

Scale does most of the work. A kitchen wall suits a piece from A4 to A2. A bed wall takes a single 70 x 100 cm canvas.

Why these paintings are free to print

The copyright in these paintings has expired in Australia, so anyone can print them. Our files come from public museum and library collections, and every artwork page points to the institution that holds the painting. We clean for dust, marks and colour balance. Nothing is repainted.

The prints are made by us, and no museum or library endorses them. The same material also comes as an Exhibition poster layout, with the artist, title, year and dates set in our own type. Choose a Gallery version on a paper ground, or a Colour version with a ground colour drawn from the picture. It names no museum, gallery or exhibition.

An art print is a giclée on 200gsm archival matte paper. A framed print sits in a 20 mm frame with perspex up front, and a canvas has mirrored edges wrapped around a 38 mm frame. Those formats hold steady across our Australian art prints, and the full canvas wall art range sits alongside these works.

Where the originals hang

Plenty of major Heidelberg School work hangs in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria and the National Gallery of Australia. Tom Roberts also has work at the Art Gallery of South Australia, and Frederick McCubbin at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

Clarice Beckett hangs at the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of South Australia. Phillips Fox is at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. Little Gossips by Jane Sutherland sits in the Kerry Stokes Collection in Perth.

The room shapes what you order. A mantel takes an A4 and an A3 leaning together with no mount. If you want a subject outside this group, the sea baths paintings cover beach and bathing scenes. The Ellis Rowan flower studies cover botanical work, and the impressionist masters collection holds European painters of the same decades. Everything else sits in the wider wall art range.