Frederick McCubbin

Frederick McCubbin painted the Australian bush at the moment his country was starting to picture itself. Born in Melbourne in 1855, a baker's son, he studied at the National Gallery of Victoria's art school and later taught there for decades. In the 1880s he joined a group of young painters who worked outdoors in camps around Melbourne, at places like Heidelberg, catching the local light directly. They became known as the Heidelberg School, Australia's own answer to Impressionism.

What set McCubbin apart was his subject. Ambitious painting still often meant grand historical scenes, and he looked instead at the hard, ordinary settler life of the bush: a man down on his luck under the gum trees, a lost child, a family carving a home out of the scrub. Down on His Luck from 1889 and On the Wallaby Track from 1896 gave those figures a quiet dignity.

His largest statement came in 1904, after he moved to Mount Macedon outside Melbourne. The Pioneer is a triptych, three panels that follow a settler and his wife from their first bush camp to a cleared plot and, in the last panel, a grave beside a growing town. It hangs in the National Gallery of Victoria, the same school where he had trained and taught.