| Backcolor: |
|
| Charcoal burners | |
| Medium: | oil on canvas |
| Height Metric: | 61.4 |
| Width Metric: | 92.3 |
| Metric Unit: | cm |
| Imperial Unit: | in |
| City: | Ballarat |
| Museum: | Art Gallery of Ballarat |
Charcoal burners (previously known as Wood splitters) is a 1886 painting by the Australian artist Tom Roberts.[1] The painting depicts three rural labourers "splitting and stacking timber for the preparation of charcoal". Roberts, influenced by the Barbizon school and Jules Bastien-Lepage, would later return to the theme of rural men working in his works A break away! and Shearing the Rams.
Roberts painted the picture from sketches made at a camp he made with Frederick McCubbin at Box Hill, then a rural locality east of Melbourne.
The painting was acquired by the Art Gallery of Ballarat in 1961.[1]
The work was stolen from the gallery in 1978. A ransom was paid the following year for the safe recovery of the painting from a park in Sydney.[2]