In this series, the curatorial team presents one work from the Meural art library we find essential. (See all installments.)

As part of Women’s History Month, I want to highlight the work of Clarice Beckett—an artist whose work so delightfully captures the charm of light and shade, and who finds meditative moments in the seemingly mundane (a busy street, a red bus driving down a rural road).

Beckett’s work alone deserves attention, but I felt her story was particularly apt in a month designed to honor women. Why? Well, there’s the all too familiar tale of the talented, trained female artist, who puts her domestic ‘duties’ (in this instance the care of her parents) before her own artistic ambitions, who nonetheless manages to produce and exhibit her work only to find she’s largely overlooked, even dismissed by the establishment. But Beckett’s story also has a fascinating, uplifting coda. Instead of being lost to the vagaries of history—another female artist forgotten, then erased—Beckett is today celebrated as one of Australia’s most important and unique landscape painters. And this reputation is almost solely thanks to the tireless work of another woman: one Rosalind Hollinrake. It was Hollinrake who found around two thousand of Beckett’s works in a shed on a property in rural Victoria (many of which could not be salvaged), who recorded the recollections of Beckett’s family and friends, who researched and exhibited Beckett’s work, and who ultimately wrote her biography.

As a student at the National Gallery School, Beckett studied under the revered modernist painter Max Meldrum—a man who once declared (to paraphrase) that ‘there would never be a great woman artist and there never had been.’ Oh Mr Meldrum! How wrong you were. There’s plenty more where Clarice came from. And many more Rosalinds to shine a light on them.

— Poppy Simpson, Head of Curation