Bailed Up
| Bailed Up | |
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| Artist | Tom Roberts |
| Year | 1895 |
| Medium | oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 134.5 cm × 182.8 cm (53.0 in × 72.0 in) |
| Location | Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney |
Bailed Up is a 1895 painting by Australian artist Tom Roberts. The painting depicts a stage coach being held up by bushrangers in an isolated, forested section of a back road. The painting is part of the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. and has been described by the former Senior Curator as "the greatest Australian landscape ever painted".
Roberts painted the work while staying at Newstead sheep station—near Inverell, New South Wales—owned by his friend Duncan Anderson. He had earlier painted The Golden Fleece, his second painting depicting sheep shearing, while at Newstead. The notorious bushranger Captain Thunderbolt had been active in the Inverell area more than twenty five years earlier and Roberts conceived an idea of painting a bushranging scene.
Roberts found his location for the painting along the road between Newstead and Paradise, a neighbouring station. The location was remote, on a flat bend on an uphill stretch of the road, surrounded by "grass trees and a forest of tall gums." At this spot Roberts, with assistance from the Anderson family, constructed a viewing platform in a tree growing on the slope below the road, thus setting himself up at road level. Roberts painted the Cobb and Co coach in Inverell and modelled the characters in the painting on people in Inverell and station hands at Newstead. Before starting on the main canvas Roberts "made tiny drawings and an oil sketch of how he wanted the scene to look."
Once complete, Roberts exhibited Bailed Up in Sydney and Melbourne. Critical reception to the work was mixed; with comment in the press about "the way the legs of the men, or the skin of the horses had been depicted" among other things. Pearce considered that "[p]erhaps unsatisfactory pictorial resolution was sensed" by collectors. Regardless, for a thirty-year period the painting failed to find a buyer. Roberts reduced his asking price from £275 to 75 guineas in 1900 but still no buyer could be found.
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