Box Hill artists' camp

The Box Hill artists' camp was a site in Box Hill, Victoria, Australia favoured by a group of plein air painters in the mid to late 1880s who later became associated with the Heidelberg School art movement, named after Heidelberg, the site of another one of their camps.

[1] In the summer of 1885–86, plein air painters Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Louis Abrahams set up a tent near Damper Creek (now Gardiners Creek) on the property of David Houston, in the Box Hill area east of Melbourne.

Painting activities were carried out on weekends by the trio over the next few years and at various times other artists joined them, including Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder, Jane Sutherland, Tom Humphrey, John Llewellyn Jones and John Mather.

In old age, Roberts recalled:[13] Happy Box Hill – the barked roof of the old people, Houstens [sic] – the land sylvan as it ever was – tea-tree along the creek – young blue gum-twigs – the ‘good night’ of the jackies as the soft darkness fell – then talks round the fire, the ‘Prof’ [McCubbin] philosophic – we forgot everything, but the peace of it.The site is located within the now suburbanised area of Box Hill South and is commemorated by a cairn in Artists Park off Prince Street.

Other local tributes to the camp include the Roberts McCubbin Primary School and the Whitehorse Artists' Trail.