[5] During the summer of 1886–87, Streeton, aged nineteen, first befriended Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin while painting en plein air at Mentone Beach.

The pair greatly admired Streeton's work and invited him to join them at artists' camps they had established in both Mentone and Box Hill.

They were later joined by Charles Conder, beginning a two-year period of close creative companionship, and forming the core group of what became known as the Heidelberg School movement, later also called Australian impressionism.

[6] In the summer drought of 1888, Streeton travelled by train to the attractive agricultural and grazing suburb of Heidelberg, 11 km north-east of Melbourne's city centre.

Charles gave him "artistic possession" of an abandoned homestead atop the summit of Mount Eagle estate, offering spectacular views across the Yarra Valley to the Dandenongs.

A long dark corridor seemed full of past visions, and out of doors a blurred rich blackness against the sharp brilliance of the Southern Cross ...

[8] He descended the hill daily to Heidelberg village for meals before jaunting into the bush with a billycan of milk and swag of paints and canvases.

Like Streeton, Withers painted from nature amidst suburban bush around Melbourne, employing earthy colours with loose, impressionistic brushstrokes.

One year Streeton's junior, Conder was already a committed plein airist, having been influenced by the painterly techniques of expatriate impressionist Girolamo Nerli.

On 2 June 1890, in the wake of an economic depression in Melbourne, Streeton sailed to Sydney, and initially stayed there with his sister in the suburb of Summer Hill.

[3] Sydney Harbour inspired many of Streeton's most poetic Symbolist paintings, a number of which infuse the Australian landscape with mythological subjects.

The influence of Japanese art, such as kakemono (hung scrolls), is evidenced in the extreme vertical formats and compositional elements he favoured around this time.

His time in England reinforced a strong sense of patriotism towards the British Empire and, like many, anticipated the coming war with Germany with some enthusiasm.

[20][21] Expected by the Commonwealth to produce sketches and drawings that were "descriptive", Streeton concentrated on the landscape of the scenes of war and did not attempt to convey the human suffering.

Streeton explained what was at that time an unconventional point of view – a perspective which was based in experience: True pictures of battlefields are very quiet looking things.

Streeton built a house on five acres (20,000m2) at Olinda in the Dandenongs where he continued to paint, though in 1936 he complained that it 'tends to interfere with the gardening,' and only produced art for 'a couple of months in the year,' though he was then preparing a Sydney exhibition in time for his 70th birthday.