AustLit

Australian artist.

Beckett was born in Casterton to Joseph and Elizabeth Beckett: Joseph managed the Colonial Bank branch. She was originally schooled in Ballarat, where she was introduced to art. The family later moved to Bendigo, from where–despite the distance–she attended the Melbourne Gallery school, where she remained for three years.

Towards the end of those three years, Max Meldrum began taking pupils out of his studio in Dudley Buildings, Collins Street, and Beckett began studying under him. She remained with Meldrum for another three or four years, in conjunction with students including Justus Jorgensen, Colin Colahan, Archibald Douglas Colquhoun, John Farmer, and August Cornehls.

Unlike many of Meldrum's better-known students, Beckett rarely worked in portraiture or figure work generally, but concentrated on landscapes and, more occasionally, on still lives. She notably favoured early morning and late afternoon light in her paintings, which were exhibited frequently around Melbourne, following an initial solo exhibition at the Atheneum in 1923.

Beckett spent much of her adult life caring for her parents, both of whom retired to Melbourne, a situation referred to obliquely in contemporary newspapers: 'Miss Beckett has been forced by circumstances–generally elements of distraction in her case–to give attention more purely to landscape', as the Age framed it ('Australian Artists').

She died in a private hospital in Sandringham in 1935, after a short illness.

Sources:

'Australian Artists of To-day : Miss Clarice Beckett'. The Age, 18 July 1931, p.7.

'Casterton Honours Clarice Beckett', Bluestone Magazine, 25 May 2014. (http://www.bluestonemagazine.com.au/2014/05/25/casterton-honours-clarice-beckett/)

'The Late Clarice Beckett', The Age, 9 July 1935, p.7.