The Heidelburg Movement is claimed as the first Australian school of art and dominated Australian art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The group was formed and led by Thomas William Roberts (1856-1931), and included notable artists Charles Conder (1868-1909), Sir Arthur Ernest Streeton (1867-1943), and Frederick McCubbin (1855-1917). The style of painting adopted by Roberts and his contemporaries was heavily influenced by French Impressionism, in particular the work of Jules Bastien-Lepage, and Roberts believed that this style of painting was an authentic Australian painting style, which was true to the unique colours and landscapes of the Australian outback, on which many of the paintings in this style were based on. The original Heidelberg group often met in the Australian bush near Heidelberg, Victoria, for a series of art "camps" between 1887 and 1890, hence the name. Tom Robert’s paintings "The Artists Camp" and "The Woodsplitters" (1886) are examples of the art directly produced as a result of their escapades into the Australian bush.

The Heidelberg Movement gained recognition at an exhibition in Melbourne in 1889, when this style of painting was viewed as a challenge to the prevailing colonial trend in Australian art, largely dominated by the old school European style depicted by artists such as John Glover and ST Gill. By early 1900, the Heidelberg Movement had all but disappeared, but continues to inspire many landscape and social realist painters in the last century. For many people, the Heidelberg Movement provided a vision of the Australian landscape as seen by early Australians in a real unsentimental way.