Year Of Birth

1887

Year Of Death

1935

Biography

Clarice Beckett 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 to Beaumaris where she lived and painted for the rest of her life. 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.