Frederick McCubbin

Tom Silver Fine Art, Melbourne
Purchased from the above in 1983

UV inspection confirms no retouching. This work is in good condition with no visible defects.
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Between 1907 and 1917 Fred McCubbin and his family lived in Kensington Road, South Yarra. The McCubbin property ran right down to the river bank, and on the opposite side could be seen the seething, smoking industrial suburbs north of the river. As the artist's daughter Kathleen Mangan was to recall: 'You looked across the Yarra at the Burnley Quarries and the old stone crusher and Richmond in the background. It was one of my father's favourite subjects. He loved that old stone crusher, and it was so accessible to paint – looking across from our hill.'¹ 

The stone crusher, with its distinctive, emphatic geometry contrasting with both the rough-hewn quarry face and the dust and smoke blurred middle distance, was indeed a subject to which McCubbin returned many times and from many viewpoints, the best known being probably Stone crusher, Richmond quarry (1908, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery), The coming of spring (1912, National Gallery of Australia), and The stone crusher (1911, Art Gallery of South Australia).

The present work is very closely related to the last of these in terms of the height and angle of view, and may be the immediate antecedent of that work. But while the Adelaide painting is a studio-fabricated narrative of industrial labour, Richmond stone crusher is more a dashing, choppy, expressive plein-air study, an atmospheric landscape in which 'the pictorial elements - colour, brushwork and texture – [begin] to free themselves from a strictly representational relationship to the real world.'²

1.  Kathleen Mangan, quoted in Andrew McKenzie, Frederick McCubbin 1855-1917: the Proff, and his art, Lilydale: Mannagum Press, 1990, p.170
2.  Bridget Whitelaw, The Art of Frederick McCubbin, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1991, p. 143