Tom Roberts recorded his first meeting with the young Arthur Streeton:

It was at Mentone that I first saw Streeton... He was standing out on the wet rocks, painting there, and I saw that his work was full of light and air. We asked him to join us...

Robert Henderson Croll, Tom Roberts: Father of Australian landscape painting, Robertson & Mullens, Melbourne, 1935, p.18.

Historical Context
Heidelberg was first settled in 1840 on the outskirts of Melbourne. At this time it was accessible by a good public transport system (Melbourne Tramway and Omnibus Pty. Ltd.) and in 1888 the Heidelberg railway opened. By 1890s the population was greater in the capital cities and large country towns than the bush, the pioneering past was rapidly disappearing.

There was a strong nationalistic spirit when Australia celebrated its centenary in 1888. The wool industry was thriving, Australia was supplying more than half the world's fine wool.

People in the cities enjoyed a higher standard of living than most people in the country. Subsistence farming was spreading, with a middle class of shopkeepers and traders in the cities. Educational institutes were being planned, as were mechanics institutes and schools of art. There was intense political activity and by 1890 all colonies in Australia had responsible government. They had two Houses of Parliament, Legislative Assembly (the Lower House), and the Legislative Council (the Upper House).

In August 1890 the General strike, also known as the Mariners' Strike, had begun. This was started by officers and seamen and supported by miners and shearers. Journalism flourished in the weeklies like the Bulletin, Boomerang and the Worker, which reported the early battles of the trade union movement. Unionism and self dependence contributed to the formation of a Commonwealth and Federation in 1901.

Background
Streeton commenced night classes at the Gallery School, Melbourne, in 1882, but his formal art training was limited due to its part-time nature. With the encouragement of Tom Roberts, Charles Conder arrived in Melbourne from Sydney in the spring of 1888. Streeton and Conder immediately established a friendship and Streeton's landscapes became influenced by the decorative quality of Conder's art. The time Conder spent in Melbourne with Streeton and Roberts is considered the golden-age of Australian painting and is the high point of the so-called Heidelberg School. In late 1888 Streeton established an artists' camp at Eaglemont, near Heidelberg, from which the term Heidelberg School is derived.

Influence
Streeton was mainly influenced by his fellow artists Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and especially Charles Conder, since they shared his inclination for plein air painting. Streeton also used books of instruction in art for guidance, particularly William Hunt's Talks about Art. Hunt was a Paris-trained American artist and teacher who encouraged artists to try for simplicity of the whole painting rather than for complexity of the parts. Hunt's admiration of Camille Corot was also shared by Streeton, who collected photographs of his paintings.

Technique and Materials
Streeton's early paintings were mainly plein air works, usually completed in one session. He occasionally made preliminary oil studies or watercolours for his larger paintings. It is known that he sometimes adjusted his paintings in his studio. The 'square-brush' method of his paint application was a legacy of Roberts' training in England.

The Painting
Near Heidelberg was painted by Streeton in the summer of 1890, the last summer that Streeton, Roberts and Conder were to spend together. In that year Conder left for Europe never to return, Streeton went to Sydney, where he lived at another artists' camp at Sirius Cove, and Roberts joined him there in 1891. In a sense this small painting, depicting the break-up after a picnic and a stroll back to civilization, is itself a farewell to a brief idyll, the bare eighteen months of the existence of the Heidelberg School.

Streeton handles this small canvas with the ease and relaxation born of familiarity with the landscape forms. The broadly stroked-in indigo and purple hills leading back to the distant Dandenongs occur frequently in his other paintings done at the Eaglemont camp. The foreground is equally broadly treated, with Streeton using the device of a path leading the eye into the picture space, up to the clump of gums silhouetted against the sky and then carried deeper into the picture by the line of straggling picnickers heading down the slope.

This simple construction, with the paint rapidly and thickly applied, is then enlivened by crisp touches of detail in the immediate foreground, the delicately curving branches of the gums against the sky and by hints of pure colour on the white summer dresses of the departing figures.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this painting is the assurance of its twenty-three year-old creator. Streeton, alone within the Heidelberg group, concentrated on landscapes and with a sureness that captured a feeling for the light and colour of the land - a land that by the 1890s had the indelible marking of man's hand upon it.