CLARICE BECKETT Australian, 1887-1935

Purchased by the present owner's father

Private collection, Melbourne

After studies in charcoal drawing in Ballarat and then under Frederick McCubbin at the National Gallery School, 1914-16, Clarice Beckett joined Max Meldrum’s classes in Melbourne. She had attended one of Meldrum’s public lectures and had been immediately impressed by both his theories on tonal impressionism and by his own art. In 1936, a year after Beckett’s tragically early death, Meldrum spoke at the opening of a memorial exhibition in her honour, saying that ‘Miss Beckett had done work that any nation could be proud of... No European critic would say that Miss Beckett belonged to any particular school, and that would be the highest compliment one could bestow; she ranked as a great artist’. ¹ Clarice Beckett’s work is unique in Australian art.

Beckett exhibited with the Meldrum School Group in 1919, 1920 and 1921. She also showed with the Twenty Melbourne Painters and the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors. In 1923 she held her first one-person exhibition, in which this exquisite early painting may have been shown (at the modest asking price of £8.8.0 inscribed on the reverse of the board). It was possibly shown again in the memorial exhibition after her death: a second, higher price of £18.8.0 is also written on the reverse, together with a note on the backing paper that this is a ‘rare example’ by the ‘late Clarice Beckett’. Although small, it is dramatic in its impact. Princes Bridge, over the Yarra River in Melbourne, fills the foreground and forms a high ‘horizon’ line in a manner somewhat reminiscent of James McNeill Whistler’s atmospheric japoniste bridge subjects (though she never visited Europe herself). Nevertheless Beckett’s aim, inseparable from her subtle but rigorous sense of design, was always ‘to give as nearly as possible an exact illusion of reality’. ² Princes Bridge, more detailed than almost any other of her paintings, is unmistakably and quintessentially 1920s Melbourne: the softly lit thoroughfare dotted with pedestrians bound to and from Flinders Street Station; a bus behind the distinctive silhouette of a cable tram on the far right; and very few cars! Beneath the arches, small boats are moored on the river, their white paintwork catching the light in an overall colour scheme of soft pinks, blues, mauve and grey.

Although Clarice Beckett exhibited her work regularly and paintings were purchased by discerning collectors, she was not well appreciated by local critics. It took the discovery by Rosalind Hollinrake in 1970 of a large - and largely forgotten - collection preserved by the artist’s sister to restore her reputation. Through a series of exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, and a superb touring retrospective in 1999-2000, Rosalind Hollinrake almost singlehandedly mounted a campaign for Beckett’s recognition - so that she is now undoubtedly regarded as one of this country’s most important women painters. Beckett was revealed as an extraordinary artist who worked every day, in all weathers, despite persistent ill health and a burdensome home life. Hollinrake’s writing on Beckett cannot be equalled for perception and depth of understanding. As she writes:  ‘Apart from seascapes and still life, Beckett unconventionally applied the title of landscape to everything, both rural and urban including the city. She painted around Melbourne until 1932 and was undeterred by the weather or location... Beckett had the idiosyncratic habit of making colour notes on small boards while she was waiting or travelling by train or walking in the street. In this way she developed an eye and a memory for colour which was considered as “nothing short of remarkable”. She saw in soft focus and there were no edges in her work. She was concerned with achieving an harmonic atmospheric unity and the fairly consistent lack of brushstrokes makes the paint appear to float on the surface of the canvas. While many paintings were completed in situ, many others were worked upon indoors, taken from colour notations, sketches and memory with later imaginative touches. Beckett was thus not always as literal as Meldrum, coming more and more to manipulate chosen forms in a modernist manner, while still maintaining an impressionist style with a mimetic aim... Early in her career she reached a high degree of technical prowess, due to her dedicated analytical observation of light and its effects upon form. This gave her a mastery and an understanding of the most delicate of tonal nuances. With the use of very little paint confidently placed she swiftly turned the most insignificant of impressions into monumental visions’. ³ 

1. Quoted in Hollinrake, R., Clarice Beckett, the Artist and her Circle, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1979, p. 32.
2.  Foreword to the Twenty Melbourne Painters Annual Exhibition catalogue of 1924, to which Beckett was a member-contributor; quoted in Perry, P. and J., Max Meldrum & Associates, their Art, Lives and Influences, Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum,  Castlemaine, 1996, p. 78. 
3.  Hollinrake, R., Clarice Beckett: Politically Incorrect, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1999, pp. 17-18.