The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (408 page)

(1856–1931).
Australian painter. He was born in England and first went to Australia as a child in 1869. In 1881 he returned to England to study at the
Royal Academy
, where he came under the influence of the art of
Bastien-Lepage
. In 1883 during a walking tour of Spain he acquired some knowledge of
Impressionism
, and when he returned to Melbourne in 1885 he gathered several other painters about him and founded what came to be known as the
Heidelberg School
. In 1903 he left for England, and did not return permanently to Australia until 1923. Apart from landscapes, Roberts also painted portraits and genre scenes, particularly of Australian rural life. He was largely responsible for introducing Impressionism to Australia and his work is regarded as beinning the growth of an indigenous school of Australian art.

 
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(1895–1980).
British painter, chiefly of figure compositions and portraits. After travelling in France and Italy, he worked briefly for the
Omega Workshops
, then in 1914 joined the
Vorticist
movement. His style at this time showed his precocious response to French modernism and was close to that of
Bomberg
in the way he depicted stiff, stylized figures through geometrically simplified forms. After the First World War (in which he served in the Royal Artillery and as an
Official War Artist
) his forms became rounder and fuller in a manner reminiscent of the ‘tubism’ of
Léger
. Often his paintings showed groups of figures in everyday settings, his most famous work being
The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel: Spring
1915, Tate Gallery, London, 1961–2), an imaginative reconstruction of his former colleagues celebrating at a favourite rendezvous to mark the publication of the first issue of
Blast
. In response to the exhibition ‘Wyndham
Lewis
and the Vorticists’ at the Tate Gallery in 1956, Roberts wrote a series of pamphlets (1956–8) disputing Lewis's claim (in the catalogue introduction) that ‘Vorticism, in fact, was what I, personally, did, and said, at a certain period.’ However, Roberts later altered his views.

 
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rocaille
.

Term applied from the mid 16th cent. onwards to fancy rock-work and shellwork for fountains and grottoes, and later to ornament based on such forms. From about 1730 it began to acquire a wider connotation, being applied to the bolder and more extravagant flights of the
Rococo
style. Indeed, it preceded the word ‘Rococo’ itself as an indication of style and the two terms have sometimes been used synonymously by French art historians.

 
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rocker
.

The tool used to prepare the surface of the plate in
mezzotint
.

 
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(1894–1978).
American illustrator and painter. He left school at 16 to study at the
Art Students League
and by the time he was 18 was a full time professional illustrator. In 1916 he had a cover accepted by the
Saturday Evening Post
, the biggest-selling weekly publication in the USA (its circulation was then about 3,000,000), and hundreds of others followed for this magazine until it ceased publication in 1969. He also worked for many other publications. Rockwell's subjects were drawn from everyday American life and his style was anecdotal, sentimental, and lovingly detailed; he described his pictorial territory as ‘this best-possible-world, Santa down-the-chimney, lovely-kids-adoring-their-kindly-grandpa sort of thing’. Such work brought him immense popularity, making him something of a national institution. For most of his career critics dismissed his work as corny, but he began to receive serious attention as a painter late in his career. In his later years, too, he sometimes turned to more serious subjects, producing a series on racism for
Look
magazine, for example. From 1953 until his death he lived at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where there is a museum devoted to him.

 
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