Clarice Beckett

Clarice Beckett (1887–1935) was an Australian painter, born in Casterton, Victoria, and a leading exponent of Australian tonalism. She studied at the National Gallery School in Melbourne under Frederick McCubbin from about 1914 and then spent nine months in 1919 with Max Meldrum, whose theory of tone and close observation shaped her work. Beckett lived mostly in Beaumaris, caring for her parents, and painted outdoors, often at dawn or dusk, producing quiet landscapes and seascapes in soft, closely related tones. She used a trolley to carry her materials. Between 1923 and the early 1930s she held ten annual solo exhibitions at the Athenaeum Gallery in Melbourne. Works such as October Morning (1927), Motor Lights (1929), Evening, St Kilda Road (1930) and Sandringham Beach (1933) are in public collections. She died of pneumonia in Melbourne in July 1935, aged 48. More than a thousand of her works were destroyed after her death, but about two thousand found in a shed in 1970 revived interest in her art.