October morning

Clarice Beckett is celebrated in Australian art for her distinctively soft or ‘misty’ paintings, these capturing the shifting effects of light falling on form. Working in a tonalist manner, she painted without any preliminary under-drawing and used a restrained palette of colours to achieve luminous and poetic atmospheric effects.

October morning is highly nuanced and exudes a sense of mystery. Set on a cliff edge in Point Avenue, Beaumaris, the work is one of her most compelling psychological portraits, with its cast shadows framing the ambiguous distant standing figure and creating a sense of theatre. The enigmatic hatted man is Jim Byrne, Beckett’s secretly desired and unattainable lover. As though reaching inwards towards the approaching figure from a space beyond the picture frame, the yellow wattle’s shadowy presence adds drama, although, somewhat strangely, this subject of inner yearning simultaneously conveys a menacing feeling. The painting’s deeply hidden underpinnings point to the artist’s fascination with Freudian ideas and the ways by which to express the mere possibility of something.

The ethereal aspect of Beckett’s paintings meant they were often mistaken as unfinished, and her interest in recording everyday subject matter was out of favour with popular taste. She never received recognition in her lifetime. After her sudden death at the age of forty-eight, she was almost lost to art history until rediscovered in 1970. Today, Beckett is regarded as one of Australia’s most remarkable twentieth-century painters.

Tracey Lock, Curator of Australian Paintings and Sculpture