Clarice Beckett’s Tonalist Landscapes: The Bittersweet Beauty of Transience

by Isabelle Holloway

The almond bloom is overpast, the apple blossoms blow.

I never loved but one man, and I never told him so.

My flowers will never come to fruit, but I have kept my pride -

A little, cold, and lonely thing, and I have naught beside.

The spring-wind caught my flowering dreams, they lightly blew away.

I never had but one true love, and he died yesterday.

- “An Old Song” by Dorothea Mackellar

At some point or another, all people experience a bitter side to time: whether in the sting of unrequited love, in revisiting one’s childhood haunt only to discover a lost luster, or in the fading face of a loved one who had passed on all too soon.

Yet, when we associate these feelings with symbolic imagery, they become sweet in their catharsis: Australian poet Dorothea Mackellar associates such unrequited love with an overpast almond bloom; a childhood haunt, say a graffitied underpass, can be associated with the deflated, polka-dotted ball that had been played with in it with one’s friends; and the grief encountered over a loved one can be associated with the cheeky, lopsided grin they would bear before cracking another joke. As such, time can become both bitter and sweet; this is an experience which becomes all the more clear through artistic expression.

Out of Mackellar’s generation blossomed another female Australian artist who poetically encapsulated this bittersweet facet of transience, though through her landscapes: Clarice Marjoribanks Beckett, a painter who cast impressionistically soft and caliginous renditions of her native Australia through Australian tonalism, a movement which emerged in Melbourne during the 1910’s.

Clarice Beckett, c. 1905, Photograph.

Beckett was a solitary, unwed woman who found comfort in seascapes, half-lit suburbias, and reading: in fact, the famous Melbourne bookseller Gino Nibbi had even defined her as “the best-read woman in Melbourne”, with her intellectual interests varying from scientific theory to theosophy. She also held a fascination with the optical play of light, particularly during atmospheric times of day, and for painting ‘ordinary’ moments en plein air. Naturally, she was drawn under the influence of Max Meldrum, the founder of Australian tonalism, who сame to designate her as his favourite student. Under Meldrum’s mentorship, Beckett was able to further her artistic interests with the formulaic capture of tone suffused throughout her surroundings to give an impression of transience; most especially, she captured such transience in weather, routine, and being.

Left: Clarice Beckett, Rainy Morning, c. 1930, oil on canvas on board, 38 x 46.5 cm, Important Australian & International Art, Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne.

Right: Clarice Beckett, Wet Night, Brighton, c. 1830, oil on board, 26.6 x 38.0 cm, private collection.

Weather, intrinsically, is a spontaneous and fickle pursuit of Mother Nature. In order, then, to give as close “as possible an exact illusion of reality”, as Beckett expresses herself, of conditions such as rain, she masterfully manipulates the depths of light and shade perceived in such immediate views. The variation of tone between trees, figures, and telephone poles in both Rainy Morning and Wet Night, Brighton communicates a unity between nature and industrialisation as they become harmoniously stratified within the misty dispersions of rain.

The pair strolling along in Rainy Morning evoke a slow, easy gait, complemented by the sensation of shuddering, rain-dampened trees beside them and the petrichor appearing to steam off on the path before them.

Such a path seems to slither on in Wet Night, Brighton, winding between telephone poles and continuing into vague, grey terrain. Illuminated by the gentle, yellow glow of a suspended light, the fore-fronting portion of the path glistens fragmentarily, eliciting the soft, pitter-pattering of rain and awakening an otherwise dimmer scene.

Left: Clarice Beckett, Princes Bridge Station, c. 1928, oil on board, 25.0 x 35.0 cm.

Middle: Clarice Beckett, Last Tram, c. 1931, oil on beaver board, 30 x 23 cm, Major Fine Art Auction, Deutscher~Menzies, Sydney.

Right: Clarice Beckett, Evening, St Kilda Road, c. 1930, oil on board, 35.5 x 40.5 cm, Important Australian and International Art, Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney.

When one accustoms to their routine, its steps can begin to feel hazy in mere repetition. This hazy nature of routine seems especially apparent during one’s commute, as the periods of waiting for, say, a train, or of the journey itself, become almost tedious, liminal phases in the day, spaced between one’s work and home life.

In Princes Bridge Station, Last Tram, and Evening, St Kilda Road, the viewer enters into a derealized state of periphery as life seems to pause, as at the empty station; signify departure, as the name Last Tram sentimentally suggests; or drift away, as the vehicles on St Kilda Road pursue a galaxial fog of lights and activity.

In each landscape, the feeling of isolation magnifies as life seems to pass one by. Yet, within the disappearing forest of poles and rails; the cool, crisp blues of inertia; and the evening smog descending upon the leisurely courses of miniature vehicles on an open-palmed road, is an underlying, sedative effect of nostalgia and familiarity. The scenes become reflective, solitary reminders of one’s place and being.

Left: Clarice Beckett, Dusk, oil on canvas on pulpboard, 24.5 x 34.5 cm, Fine Australian & International Paintings, Sotheby's, Melbourne.

Right: Clarice Beckett, Winter Reflections, oil on board, 25 x 36 cm, Modern and Contemporary Art, Shapiro Auctioneers, Sydney.

There is a consuming sense of peace and beauty to be found within the ephemeral transitions between day and night. Whether in dusk, dawn, or twilight, the wanderer, or viewer, can feel as if their being almost scatters along with the tricks of light around them. This is true in Dusk and Winter Reflections, as such rare points of day make it feel as if the world is empty and that one is ‘one’ with all.

In Dusk, the whole sky appears to drip with gold; the horizon caramelizes, the street-lamps twinkle, and the branches sweep the darkened ground as if to stir sky and land into single solidarity. A shaded mass form along the path, but whether this is a person, bush, or something entirely else is insignificant - for this landscape is a celebration of raw element and colour as it is experienced for the individual.

A bare tree, supplicated like a hand, stretches out across the mirrored canvas of sky and water in Winter Reflections. This mirrored canvas spreads like an expansive, glazed ice skating rink. Without any particularly striking topographical features, and with the other side seeming so far, yet so close, a dreamer can feel themselves skate across this wintry rink of their own meditations, spinning with the panoramic pastels of pinks and purples into some beyond.

Through Australian tonalism, Beckett is able to sensitively depict the candid transience of every-day moments around her, whether of rainfall, passing trams, or atmospheric conditions of light. Of course there is a certain melancholy in this transience and what it represents: whether of weather, routine, or even being. The constant presence and symbolic associations of such passages of time can feel slippery and unreal. Yet, like the calm after a storm, Beckett’s often quietly moody pieces convey a sense of reassurance and serenity. The blur of everything creates a kind of spiritual ‘togetherness’: trees and people, rain and trams; the products of civilization, industrialization, and season; everything becomes one, elegant whole. The viewer finds that the blurred sensation of Beckett’s landscapes, too, mimic the blurred perception of memories, and so her landscapes become imprinted all the more strikingly and familiarly, inviting us, thereafter, to embrace impermanence as permanently romanticized memories. Although bittersweet at times, Beckett ultimately teaches us to embrace transience, particularly as remembered, manifest imagery, because in change and loss there is growth and new life, and that is beautiful.

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