It shows the interior of a miner's cottage on the Victorian goldfields with an old man breaking the news to a woman of her husband's death in a mining accident.

[3] Only one month after the painting was first exhibited in Melbourne, eighty-one coal miners perished in a gas explosion at the Bulli Mine in New South Wales.

According to biographer Nina Murdoch, Longstaff's childhood memory of a mining fatality was the direct inspiration for Breaking the News: "the day at Clunes, following the tragic cortège from mine-head to cottage door, he had heard the stricken cry of the young wife at the sight of the stretcher-bearers' burden".

[4] Renowned Australian writer and poet Henry Lawson declared himself a "worshipper" of Longstaff after viewing Breaking the News, and discussed the painting's sentimental and social impact at length in an 1899 essay for The Bulletin titled "If I Could Paint", concluding that he'd "be prouder of a picture like Breaking the News than of a hundred exquisite alleged studies in the "nood".

"[5] The following year, The Bulletin co-founder and then-owner of Breaking the News, J. F. Archibald, commissioned Longstaff to paint a portrait of Lawson.