Introducing Clarice Beckett

Clarice Beckett was born in 1887 in Casterton in regional Victoria. Today she is recognised as one of Australia’s most important painters of the interwar period, yet her contribution was almost completely lost to art history. Many of Beckett’s paintings were either destroyed or damaged after her premature death in 1935 from pneumonia which she contracted while painting in the rain near her seaside home at Beaumaris, Melbourne.

In 1914 Beckett enrolled at the National Gallery School in Melbourne where she studied drawing for three years under the tuition of Australian artist Frederick McCubbin. Beckett declined a fourth year of study in oils under Bernard Hall and instead joined controversial tonalist painter and teacher Max Meldrum in his newly opened private art school. In 1919 she moved from Bendigo with her parents to Beaumaris which is located in Bayside Melbourne, where she lived and painted for the rest of her life. She enjoyed painting at all times of the day, however towards the end of her life, as she cared for her elderly mother, she predominantly painted in the early mornings and evenings. Beckett also developed a strong interest in music and literature.

Beckett depicted everyday views of her local environment including transient subjects such as moving cars, trams, lone figures, waves and shadows. Her misty paintings of modern Melbourne in the 1920s and 1930s captured the outdoors, including sea and beachscapes, and suburban street scenes, that often recorded the shifting effects of light– either in the quiet, early morning or in the stillness of the evening.

Her paintings of the local environment possess a sense of timelessness. No prior knowledge is required to appreciate Beckett’s paintings, anyone who has engaged with the outside world can relate to and experience a connection to these subtle and silent paintings of nature.

Beckett exhibited her work for sixteen years, including in solo exhibitions every year between 1923 and 1933 at the Athenaeum Gallery in Melbourne. She also exhibited in group shows and was invited to join the Twenty Melbourne Painters, a group of break-away artists who were supporters or students of Meldrum. Her perceived alignment with the polarising figure of Meldrum saw her publicly ridiculed, and this, together with the modest and less heroic nature of her landscapes, resulted in limited critical attention during her lifetime. The critic Bruce James observed, her paintings, ‘are little evocations that build like musical phrases towards a greater and more compelling whole. That’s why groups of Becketts can be so thunderous’ - ‘Universal vision in dull suburbia’, The Age, 22 March 1995

Tonalism is a painting system without any preliminary drawing of a subject where artists record tonal impressions quickly onto a canvas with oil paints. This is done in the order that the impressions met the eye, often reducing a scene to large areas of light and dark. This is based on Max Meldrum’s theory that the mind can be trained to receive visual impressions in varying orders of importance, with the most significant being the majority tonal value. This is the first value that should be directly painted onto the canvas. The painting is then built up through recording these initial impressions.

The aim of tonalism is to create an illusion of nature, one that responds to the environment in an immediate way. It is an objective study of nature, with artists using a radically reduced colour palette and feathering brushwork. The method requires artists to use only five tones which are applied with a round brush and a generous amount of paint to ensure the transition between tones is seamless.

The systematic nature of Australian school of tonalism means that an identifiable soft impressionist style was created by Meldrum and his followers. At times this made it difficult to distinguish the work of different artists. Beckett’s work stands apart from other Meldrum Group artists (Meldrumites), who applied Meldrum’s Tonalism. Beckett’s work captured extraordinary spatial recession and smooth, velvet painted surfaces and were almost much brighter in colour. She was the finest colourist of the Meldrum Group and the first to develop signature motifs, such as the telegraph pole, roof tops and the motor car. 

Clarice Beckett had an extraordinary ability to convey a sense of distance in her paintings and surround her subjects in atmosphere. With this she depicted the presence of space and air which resulted in smoky or blurred representations. This quality was often misunderstood and referred to as fog.

Beckett’s dissolving of form creates a feeling of recessive space and distance. In this way she followed the ideas of Meldrum, who said that when standing ‘before a good picture the spectator should feel the ability to take a deep breath. There must be a feeling of depth and air’. The illusionary sensation of a breathy atmospheric moment was a well- known practice of the impressionists and of American painter James Abbott McNeil Whistler, who advised: ‘Paint should not be applied thick. It should be like breath on the surface of a pane of glass’. Beckett made a tribute painting to Whistler titled Evening after Whistler, c. 1931.