Tom Roberts was the grandson of Samuel Roberts, who founded Roberts Gallery in Toronto in 1842. As a child, Roberts developed his passion for art while growing up around the gallery, and ultimately decided that he wanted to pursue a career as an artist. He studied at Toronto’s Central Technical School and at the Ontario College of art under well-known artists such as J.W. Beatty and Frederick Haines. By 1928 he was established as a free-lance artist in the fields of commercial and fine art.

His Canadian wilderness scenes were influenced by the French Impressionists, Beatty and the Group of Seven. His intense love of the land resulted in a prolific number of landscape paintings from coast to coast in a variety of subjects, such as maritime lighthouses, rural Quebec churches, the St. Lawrence River, Ontario farms, children playing hockey on frozen ponds, and the Fraser Valley in British Columbia. Roberts also served in World War II with the Royal Canadian Engineers, assigned to architectural drafting, and portrayed military life in pencil and watercolour sketches. By the mid-1980s Roberts had held over 30 (often sold out) individual exhibitions in Toronto alone. Over the years he moved towards simpler designs and abstracted compositions, yet still retained his skill for creating gentle and calming scenes.

Roberts was a member of the Ontario Society of Artists and an Associate Member of the Royal Canadian Academy, and he was a regular contributor to their exhibitions over the years, as well as the Canadian National Exhibition. Roberts’s work has been acquired by private collectors and public galleries across the country, including the London Public Library and Art Museum, the University of Western Ontario, London, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Ontario Art Collection, the New Galbraith Building, the University of Toronto, the Ford Motor Company, Imperial Oil, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, the University of Guelph Art Collection and the Seagram Collection, among others.