Moore College, Liverpool, New South Wales.

Biography:

John Rider Roberts

Landscape painter, illustrator, surveyor and architect, was closely associated with the Illustrated Sydney News (1853-1855; 1863-1868) and advertised as a surveyor in Jamison Street, Sydney, in January 1854. By May he was in partnership with Henry Haege as surveyors and civil engineers; the following year they were listed as architects. One of Roberts’s major artistic activities was ‘improving’ the survey plans he and Haege provided for land auctioneers by adding topographical views of the areas up for subdivision. Two such views (‘looking to the south-east, embodies a grand view of Botany Bay’ and ‘looking to the North Head, is a view of the Railway and Petersham Station’) appear on a survey plan dated October 1854. Roberts was closely associated with the Illustrated Sydney News during both its first (1853-1855) and second series (from 1863 until his death). He provided many topographical drawings, including a very large View of the City of Sydney and Port Jackson , used in January 1854 when the paper stated: ‘Mr Roberts is a great observer of nature, and … endeavours to imitate what he sees. Many artists are satisfied with giving a general idea of the outline of a landscape and completing it in a peculiar style of their own, so much so indeed, that the picture might be in any part of the world, they make nature subservient to their style; in this case Mr Roberts makes his style subservient to nature, consequently we have a correct notion on inspecting his drawings, of Australian scenery’. As head of the art department for the first series.

 His obituary in the Illustrated Sydney News called him ‘a painstaking landscape artist of no mean ability’.