FREDERICK McCUBBIN

Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne
Private collection Sydney; purchased from the above in December 1987

AAA First Annual Exhibition, Buxton's Rooms, Melbourne, 7 September, 1886, cat.  6

Argus, 7 September, 1886, p. 7: 'gum study'
Leigh Astbury,, Sunlight and Shadow: Australian Impressionist Painters 1880-1900, Bay Books, Sydney, 1989, pp. 73-74 illus. pl. 53
Helen Topliss, The Artist's Camps: Plein Air Painting in Melbourne 1885-1898, Monash University, Melbourne, 1984, cat. 44
Helen Topliss, The Artist's Camps: Plein Air Painting in Australia, Hedley Australia Publications, Melbourne, 1992, p. 75 illus.
Terence Lane, Australian Impressionism (exh. cat), National Gallery Victoria, Melbourne, 2007 p. 62 (illus)

Original John Thallon frame (gold). The work is in good condition under UV light. There are three areas of flaring: upper right hand edge against the tree; similar area upper centre against tree branch; and upper right against rebate.
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The first recognisable school of settler art, now known as Australian Impressionism, developed through the intersection of plein-air naturalism with an emergent nationalism in culture and in politics.  A number of immigrant painters in the late 1870s and early 1880s - most notably Julian Ashton, but also Arthur Daplyn, Arthur Loureiro, Charles Rolando and others - brought their European plein-air experience to bear on the local landscape.  The new master of the art school at the National Gallery of Victoria, George Folingsby, although perhaps best known for his Munich school figure-drawing, history-painting emphasis, also encouraged his students to sketch outdoors.  With the return to Australia of the charismatic Tom Roberts in 1885, the stage was set for the final emergence of a national school of landscape painting.

The first of the celebrated artist's camps of the 1880s was at Box Hill, on David Houston's property, less than a mile from the new Box Hill railway station.  Here, in the summer of 1885-86, Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Louis Abrahams had their first extended campaign of painting the in bush.  As Leigh Astbury has noted, the present work was 'probably painted in the open air at the Box Hill camp'¹, and the painting has a high-key freshness and directness of application that make it as sensually delightful as it is historically important.

While the work is in essence a 'pure' landscape, an on-the-spot transcription of the play of light over trunks and branches, leaves and grass, it is notable that it should bear the poetic title 'At the falling of the year'.  The words are a recurring phrase in A Song of Autumn, a poem by Adam Lindsay Gordon from his valedictory 1870 anthology Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes.  What is significant in McCubbin's choice of title is not so much the content (though the poem's sentimental melancholic tone matches that of many of 'The Prof's' own compositions) as the authorship.  Gordon was an Australian poet, and much admired by the firmly, even stridently nationalist cultural vanguard of the 1880s.  It is not surprising to learn that Melbourne's Buonarotti club (of which McCubbin was a member) held a special Adam Lindsay Gordon night in the same year that this work was painted.  Interestingly, during the course of that evening, Miss Alice Brotherton read a paper on 'The Open Air Elements in Gordon's Poems'.² 

The painting is also significant in its primary motif of the two young trees at the right.  In a number of well-known works from the late 1880s - Tom Roberts' A Summer Morning's Tiff (1986, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery) and Reconciliation (1886-87, Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum), Tom Humphrey's The Way to School (1888, Warrnambool Art Gallery), Jane Sutherland's Little Gossips (1888, Kerry Stokes Collection) - such tall, slender eucalypts serve as framing devices that anchor or emphasise the pictures' human interest.  Particularly useful is the emphatic double vertical, the device of two saplings growing immediately next to each other, one thicker than the other, with perhaps one curved and the other straight, or with one dark-toned and rough-barked, the other light and smooth.  McCubbin, too, used the double eucalypt for compositional emphasis, notably in his first large 'national' narrative, the popular Lost (1886, National Gallery of Victoria).  A close comparison of the two works shows that the pair of trees to the right of the bushwhacked little girl are precisely those first described in 'At the Falling of the year'.

1. Leigh Astbury, 'Memory and Desire: Box Hill 1885 - 1888', in Terence Lane (ed.), Australian Impressionism, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, p. 52
2. ibid., p. 51