Conway Hart arrived in Melbourne in 1850 and worked there and in Geelong before relocating to Hobart in early 1855. An August 1856 review of his Liverpool Street ‘Portrait Gallery’ stated that ‘the portraits issuing from this studio excel anything witnessed before in this colony’. Like many successful colonists in Hobart, William Robertson senior commissioned several local artists to record his family, including this portrait of his son William Robertson (1839–1892). Robertson senior had emigrated to Van Diemen’s Land in 1824 and in the mid-1830s invested in a scheme to expand pastoral activities to Port Phillip. He eventually moved his family to an estate near Colac, called The Hill, building it into one of Victoria’s leading cattle studs. William Robertson junior, a lawyer and politician, inherited the Colac property on his father’s death in 1874; two years later he retired as a barrister and with his three brothers focused on the management of the family properties. He was a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly in the 1870s and 1880s.
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 2017
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Malcolm Robertson tells the family history of one of Australia's earliest patrons of the arts, his Scottish born great great great grandfather, William Robertson.
Open every day
Drawn from the National Portrait Gallery collection, this salon-style hang references the lavish 18th- and 19th-century European salons where paintings were hung floor-to-ceiling.
![William and Martha Mary Robertson and their children [William St Leonards, Eliza, John, William St Leonards on a horse, Beatrice and Ida]](/files/5/3/6/1/i12225-th.jpg "William and Martha Mary Robertson and their children [William St Leonards, Eliza, John, William St Leonards on a horse, Beatrice and Ida]")
