In this final chapter, McQueen is concerned to survey the refashioning of Roberts’ reputation since his death in 1931. In the rehabilitation of Roberts, which began with the biography that his second wife commissioned from R.H. Croll, the notion of the artist as ‘Father of Australian Landscape Painting’ (Croll’s subtitle) was crucial. For McQueen, this is an occasion to concentrate the scepticism that he brings to many aspects of Roberts’ work. As we reach the end of a book that has been grudging in any attempt to evoke a personality and – after fourteen years – is, or has become, apparently lacking in admiration for its subject, we are inclined to ask why McQueen so arduously pursued the task? He begins in Roberts’ (and Thomas Hardy’s) home town of Dorchester, with an initial Marxist gesture. To meander about the place is still ‘to encounter the architecture of power that formed Tom Roberts’. His father, Richard, was a journalist who became editor of the Dorset Country Chronicle. It follows, for McQueen; that once so employed ‘by rural capitalists’, the elder Roberts ‘managed their labour force and advanced arguments to serve their interests’. This is an unremarkable inference, but not content with it, McQueen subsequently discerns traces of the father in the son as Tom sought vice-regal patronage or, in his most famous painting, Shearing the Rams, depicted ‘labour without a class struggle’. Act as ‘one of a bourgeois intelligentsia’ Richard Roberts might, but it did nothing to stop him dying young. His widow’s solution to the prospect of impoverishment was to follow her sisters to Australia.

Once there, in Collingwood, Tom Roberts worked in a photographer’s studio, arranging scenery and sitters, and was soon on his way as a painter. McQueen remembers to ask why. Modestly, Roberts blamed ‘good fortune’, but in this determinedly anti-romantic telling of his life, McQueen ventures no explanation. Certainly, genius is given no part. Indeed, McQueen is more puzzled by Roberts’ persistence, in that he was ‘competent, rarely inspired, and made out rather than triumphed’. Seldom can a renowned painter (whatever the basis for the ‘construction’ of his fame) have been treated so coolly by his biographer. It is as if twice seven lean years went into the making of this book.

Most of the invigorating episodes McQueen relates are incidental to Roberts. He never fails to be detained by a good story, however vaguely connected to his subject. Regular appearances by Barbara Baynton are diverting, that of ‘the Croatian coloratura, Ilma de Murska’, bigamist and maybe murderer, is fun. Yet as the technique is pursued through chapter after chapter (most of which bear drolly apposite titles from literature) one feels most strongly McQueen’s desire to waste none of his research. A corollary is the dubious practice of speculation. Tom Roberts is studded with ‘could have’, ‘perhaps’, ‘might’, ‘probably’. Roberts might have seen that opera, visited that exhibition, even run an errand for Thomas Hardy. Or he might not. The impulse to put him in many contextual frames successfully gives an impression of the material world in which Roberts moved and sold, but still seems to indicate a limited interest in the man.

Nonetheless, miscellaneous observations and judgments accrue. McQueen endorses rumours that Roberts was a philanderer; demonstrates convincingly the doggedness with which he pursued his craft (‘Business, my dear boy, business’); gives glimpses of a greater ease for Roberts in travel, in his own company, than on the frequent occasions when his sociability was valued by women and men. Roberts’ arduous work as a medical orderly during the Great War (which he continued into his sixties) almost leads McQueen into fondness. Otherwise, the eighteen years that Roberts spent back in England are viewed as a period of artistic failure. McQueen acidly considers this in the context of a marriage of which Roberts ‘arguably had the worst ... because her money had allowed him to go on wasting his limited talents around London’.

Of more than one thousand paintings, McQueen finds few worthy of regard, and then "for historical rather than aesthetic reasons. Quoting several fine examples of incisive prose by Roberts (often in response to the critic James Smith), McQueen speculates that he might have been better employed as a teacher, or critic, than as an artist. While Roberts was regarded as Australia’s finest portrait painter, McQueen castigates this profitable ‘face-making’ as ‘devoid of psychological analysis’, although the portraits ‘encouraged optimism about sound minds in healthy bodies’ in the coming race in Australia. Famous individual works are also disparaged. Bailed Up is ‘a flop ... a disappointment’. This is rather opinion than revisionism. For the latter, one can tum to McQueen’s downplaying of the Heidelberg School and his intermittent account of Roberts’ relations with such predecessors as Buvelot, and contemporaries such as Streeton.

In 1901, Table Talk spoke of Roberts’s The Golden Fleece and A break away! as ‘among the real historical documents of Australia’. They remain enduringly popular images of an indeterminate, heroic past time, yet are more subtly fashioned, more elusive of reductive interpretation than the magazine, let alone McQueen, might wish. Roberts’ creative efforts might have been in a minor key. The new Parliament House might be the fittest repository for his ‘big picture’ (with 250 recognisable faces) of the opening of the first Commonwealth Parliament. Yet his art is likely to survive the costive attention that McQueen so lavishly bestows upon it. And there are other lives of Roberts to be written.