12 Facts About Frederick McCubbin

Frederick McCubbin was an Australian artist, art teacher and prominent member of the Heidelberg School art movement, known as Australian impressionism.

Concerned with capturing the national life of Australia, Frederick McCubbin produced a number of large landscapes that reflect the melancholic themes then popular in literary accounts of European settlers' interactions with the bush.

Frederick McCubbin was born in Melbourne, the third of eight children of baker Alexander Frederick McCubbin and his English wife Anne, nee McWilliams.

Frederick McCubbin was educated at William Willmett's West Melbourne Common School and St Paul's School, Swanston Street.

Frederick McCubbin later worked for a time as solicitor's clerk, a coach painter and in his family's bakery business while studying art at the National Gallery of Victoria's School of Design, where he met Tom Roberts and studied under Eugene von Guerard.

Frederick McCubbin studied at the Victorian Academy of the Arts and exhibited there in 1876 and again from 1879 to 1882, selling his first painting in 1880.

In 1883, Frederick McCubbin received first prize in the first annual Gallery students' exhibition, for best studies in colour and drawing.

Frederick McCubbin was exhibiting and perhaps painting in the studio of his friend Tom Roberts in the Grosvenor Chambers in Collins St by May 1888.

Frederick McCubbin continued to paint through the first two decades of the 20th century, though by the beginning of World War I his health began to fail.

Frederick McCubbin traveled to England in 1907 and visited Tasmania, but aside from these relatively short excursions lived most of his life in Melbourne.

In 1998 Frederick McCubbin's painting Bush Idyll sold for $2,312,500, a then-record price for an Australian painting at public auction.

On 22 March 2016, Frederick McCubbin's painting An Old Politician, resurfaced from a private vault in an Australian bank.