Clarice Beckett

Clarice Beckett was born in Casterson, Victoria in 1887. She enrolled at the National Gallery School in Melbourne and studied drawing under Frederick McCubbin before electing to study under Max Meldrum, rather than continuing a fourth year under the conservative director Bernard Hall. In 1919 she moved from Bendigo to the seaside suburb of Beaumaris outside of Melbourne, where she lived and worked until her premature death from pneumonia in 1935.

Under-recognised during her lifetime, Beckett has recently featured in exhibitions including Clarice Beckett: The present moment at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2021); and the major group exhibition of Australian women artists Know my name at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2021–22) and Her own path: Margaret Baskerville, Clarice Beckett, Janet Cumbrae Stewart, Norah Gurdon, and Jessie Traill, Bayside Gallery, Melbourne (2022). Beckett is now considered one of Australia’s most significant early modernists, and one of Australia’s leading female artists of the twentieth century.