22 Facts About William Frater

William Frater was a Scottish-born Australian stained-glass designer and modernist painter who challenged conservative tastes in Australian art.

William Frater was born on 31 January 1890 at Ochiltree Castle, near Linlithgow in West Lothian in Scotland.

William Frater's father was forester William Frater and mother Sarah Boyd a farm servant.

William Frater gained his Merit Certificate at Bridgend School, Auldhill Road, West Lothian in 1903, and attended Kingscavil Public School in 1904, then studied art at the Linlithgow Academy in 1905 before taking up a three-year apprenticeship in 1905 in the Oscar Paterson glass studio in Glasgow.

William Frater won the Glasgow School of Art Haldane Scholarship for drawing in 1906 and studied in the craft and stained glass workshops.

However his uncle, fearing a penniless future for his nephew, prevented his entry into the final year to take painting, and William Frater left the school 1909, migrating on the liner Norseman to Melbourne in September 1910, a year after his younger brother Tom, who had continued on to Sydney.

William Frater enrolled in the Victorian Artists' Society life class but his behaviour had him ejected.

Between 1915 and 1920 William Frater simplified his composition and design, based on his stained glass experience.

William Frater experimented with Cezannesque modernist colour over the next decade, during which he led and taught a group of Australian modernists, assisting in the modern art school established by George Bell and Frater's lifelong friend Arnold Shore.

William Frater was characterised in a 1933 Art in Australia article as a stereotypical Scot;.

In 1936 William Frater visited a flat in South Yarra owned by well-to-do Lina Bryans to advise her on stained-glass windows, and painted her portrait.

William Frater regarded a "certain strangeness", in his art in response to the Australian landscape as an essential attribute of great art.

William Frater exhibited at the Contemporary Art Society, and in solo shows at Georges Gallery, Melbourne, and the Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, in 1946, expanding his subject matter with visits sponsored by the airline TAA to Central Australia in 1950 and Port Douglas in 1952.

William Frater exhibited at Australian Galleries, Melbourne in 1958 and the Victorian Artists' Society in 1963, from which date he became president of the Society until 1972, exhibiting annually with them.

In 1967, in the midst of the Vietnam War William Frater joined in solidarity a controversial pacifist exhibition of the Victorian Branch of the Contemporary Art Society at Melbourne's Argus Gallery, traveling to Adelaide under the aegis of the South Australian Campaign for Peace in Vietnam.

William Frater was given a retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1966 and a final exhibition in July 1973.

William Frater's work is represented there, and in galleries and private collections throughout Australia as well as the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow.

William Frater was not well known outside Victoria and his support and application of modernist principles in his art met often with uninterest or derision from Australia's mid-century conservative audiences.

William Frater is an earlier pioneer, of modern rather than contemporary art.

William Frater's work was flown to Papua New Guinea for an exhibition in 1973 that was intended to reveal the influence of the country's indigenous art on modernist painters.

William Frater won the Dunlop art competition in 1950 and the Eltham Art Award in 1964.

William Frater was survived by his four sons and daughter.