The Melbourne journal Table Talk described the subject of Tom Roberts’s Jealousy as ‘a young lady seated in a recess, becoming the voluntary or involuntary auditor of a flirtation which is being carried on by a rival round the corner, with the listener’s own lover’. While the critic’s decision not to identify the genders of the ‘rival’ and the ‘lover’ was most certainly heteronormative, it is worth pondering other possibilities. Indeed, the painting’s original title – One, not easily jealous, but, being wrought, perplex’d in the extreme – came from Shakespeare’s Othello, the ‘rival’ being a man, the ‘lover’ a woman. Roberts painted Jealousy in his studio, which was praised by Table Talk as being ‘most picturesquely arranged’ in the fashionable Aesthetic style. The Aesthetic movement, popularised by Oscar Wilde, was embraced by Melbourne’s artists, at least until news of Wilde’s arrest in 1895 reached Collins Street. ‘[Melbourne’s] pawnbrokers absolutely refuse to advance on velvet coats’, observed the Sydney Bulletin in May 1895. Roberts married in 1896, shortly after his 40th birthday.
