21 Facts About Clarice Beckett

Clarice Marjoribanks Beckett was an Australian artist and a key member of the Australian tonalist movement.

Clarice Beckett exhibited with the Meldrum-inspired Twenty Melbourne Painters Society, and staged the first of her ten annual solo exhibitions in 1923.

Clarice Beckett never left Victoria and rarely travelled outside Melbourne, much of her adult life being spent caring for her ailing parents at their home in bayside Beaumaris.

Clarice Beckett did however paint prolifically, often en plein air in and around Beaumaris, and mostly at daybreak or towards evening, when she was exempted from domestic duties.

In 1935, while painting the sea off Beaumaris during a winter storm, Clarice Beckett contracted pneumonia and died four days later, aged 48.

In 1914, Beckett and her sister moved back to Melbourne to attend the National Gallery School, where Clarice completed three years of study under Frederick McCubbin, one of the leading figures of Heidelberg School of Australian impressionism.

In 1919, Clarice Beckett became the first National Gallery student to break from the school and study under rival teacher Max Meldrum, whose controversial theories became a pivotal factor in her own art practice.

Clarice Beckett had met Meldrum as early as 1906, when, through the friendship of Beatrix Hoile and her husband Alexander Colquhoun, she became associated with an artistic circle that he frequented.

Clarice Beckett did however regularly exhibit with other Australian tonalists at the Melbourne Athenaeum, and with the Meldrum-inspired Twenty Melbourne Painters Society.

In 1926, Clarice Beckett painted during a six-month sojourn in Victoria's Western District using as a studio the upper level of a shearing shed at the Naringal property of the brother of her good friend, Maud Rowe.

Clarice Beckett elucidated her artistic aims in what is her only known surviving written statement, published in the catalogue accompanying the sixth annual exhibition of the Twenty Melbourne Painters Society, held in 1924:.

Clarice Beckett's subjects were sea and beachscapes, and rural and suburban scenes, often enveloped in the atmospheric effects of early mornings or evening.

In 1925, Herald reviewer and staunch anti-modernist James S MacDonald was especially derogatory, favouring, if anything, the flower studies that Beckett regarded as minor in comparison with her landscapes.

Clarice Beckett's subjects were often drawn from the Beaumaris area, where she lived for the latter part of her life.

Clarice Beckett was one of the first of Meldrum's group to use a painting trolley, or mobile easel to make it easier to paint outdoors in different locations.

In 1971, Clarice Beckett's sister alerted Hollinrake to a tragedy; more than 2,000 of her works had been left abandoned to the elements and vermin in an open-sided hay shed near Benalla.

Five commercial gallery exhibitions of Clarice Beckett's work were staged from 1971 to 1980.

Over 1999 and 2000, the retrospective exhibition "Politically incorrect: Clarice Beckett" was organised by the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, and Rosalind Hollinrake.

Clarice Beckett is memorialised in Clarice Beckett's Lane in the Melbourne suburb of Black Rock, and in the naming of Beckett Ward, one of seven City of Bayside municipal wards.

Clarice Beckett is the eponym of Beckett, a crater on the planet Mercury, discovered in 2008 and named by the International Astronomical Union.

Nobel laureate Patrick White referred to Clarice Beckett's work when discussing influences on his 1979 novel The Twyborn Affair, which has been described as vivid and painterly in its representation of landscape.