The group of artists now collectively referred to as members of the ‘Heidelberg School’ – Frederick McCubbin, Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder and Louis Abrahams – are named after one of the areas skirting Melbourne where they worked. The Heidelberg painters defined a new direction for Australian art, drawing on domestic, semi-rural landscapes and urban life as impetus for a national ‘school’ of painting. 

The group frequently painted on cigar-box lids (measuring approximately nine by five inches) and other small panels, which enabled them to record impressions in the field quickly. In 1889, they showed some of these paintings in the ‘9 x 5 Impression Exhibition’, the first self-consciously avant-garde exhibition in Australia. The scale and sketchiness of these artworks attracted some criticism. In their defence, the artists stated:

Any effect of nature which moves us strongly by its beauty, whether strong or vague in its drawing, defined or indefinite in its light, rare or ordinary in colour, is worthy of our best efforts.