Lot 30

Rosalind Humphries Galleries, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne
Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 21 March 2017, lot 24
Private collection, Sydney

Clarice Beckett is considered one of Australia's leading artists of the early twentieth century, despite her contribution almost being completely lost to art history. Working largely in and around Melbourne, she transformed ordinary subjects such as roads, beaches, trees and twilight, into intensely atmospheric studies of perception. Her paintings resist the monumental rhetoric of Australian landscape painting as there are no grand vistas or heroic gestures. Instead, Beckett found significance in fleeting changes of light, weather and colour, creating images that seem suspended between observation and memory.

Her artistic interest was shaped first by her studies at the National Gallery School under Frederick McCubbin and then greatly influenced by Max Meldrum. Meldrum's theory of tonal painting encouraged artists to attend closely to relationships of light and dark rather than to isolated local colours. Beckett absorbed this principle but made it profoundly her own. Her aim was to give a "sincere and truthful representation" of nature through the careful observation of tone, while her mature paintings increasingly demonstrate how such observation could lead towards abstraction. (1) Beckett's artworks remain recognisably grounded in place while dissolving details into colour, atmosphere and sensation. McGuire perfectly describes her practice as a process of "working before and abstracting from, the real world". (2)

Beckett's artwork titled Sherbrooke, depicting Sherbrooke Forest, offers a compelling example of this practice. Located in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne, Sherbrooke Forest provided Beckett with a landscape distinctly different from the open beaches and suburban roads for which she is most known. In this painting, the forest becomes a dense field of vertical trunks, subdued green and yellow ochres and soft passages of light. Rather than detailing individual trees, Beckett allows them to merge into an atmospheric structure. The composition's broad and hazy tonal passages are characteristic of Beckett's mature sensibility. In the foreground, earthy reds and muted greens establish a shallow spatial recession, while the pale track draws the eye into the treelined distance.

There are only a few accounts of Beckett painting scenes of Sherbrooke Forest, including a National Gallery of Australia work '(Sherbrooke Forest)' c.1919-1935 and another 'Sherbrooke Forest' c.1925 that came up for auction with Christie's Melbourne in 2005 and 'Wattle at Sherbrooke' c.1923, sold with Deutscher and Hackett in 2023. These examples expand our understanding of Beckett's geography. Although deeply associated with Beaumaris and Melbourne's bayside environment, she also sought out forested landscapes in which tone, depth and atmosphere could be explored with equal intensity.

Beckett's success lies partly in her ability to make the transient enduring. Her paintings do not simply record a particular place, they convey what it felt like to stand there at a specified moment. This sensitivity was largely overlooked during her lifetime and after her premature death from pneumonia in 1935. Decades later, curator Rosalind Hollinrake's rediscovery of hundreds of surviving works helped restore Beckett's artworks to Australian art history as important expressions of early Australian modernism. In 'Sherbrooke', as in so many of her works, the ordinary landscape becomes something elusive and luminous; a world perceived through atmosphere, memory and light.

Amanda Hayward (née North)
Senior Fine Art Specialist

(1) Clarice Beckett, Twenty Melbourne Painters catalogue: 6th annual exhibition, Phoenix Press, Melbourne, 1924, quoted in Frances Lindsay, 'Foreword', in Rosalind Hollinrake, Clarice Beckett: politically incorrect, Exhibition catalogue, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, 1999, p. 19.
(2) McGuire, M., The singular career of Clarice Beckett: painting and society in Melbourne, 1916-1936, Masters research thesis, Department of Fine Arts, Faculty of Arts, The University of Melbourne, 1984, p. 63.