An autumn morning, Milson's Point, Sydney

Tom Roberts was one of the founders of the Heidelberg School, the Australian Impressionist movement that transformed the representation of Australian landscape and light in the 1880s and 1890s. This 1888 view of an autumn morning at Milson's Point in Sydney shows the harbour and the northern shore with characteristic Heidelberg School directness and sensitivity to local light. Roberts and his colleagues were determined to paint Australia as they actually saw it, free from the European conventions that dominated colonial art. The painting is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Roberts captures the bright, clear quality of Sydney autumn morning light with confident plein-air brushwork, building the harbour scene through dabs and strokes of blue, green, and warm ochre. The composition is informal and freshly observed, with the water and distant shore rendered in the fluid, broken manner influenced by French Impressionism.