McCabin, Frederick

Frederick McCabbin was born in 1855 in Melbourne, the third of eight children in the family of baker Alexander Maccabbin and his wife Annie, nee Mac Williams. Until 1869 he attended school, then got a job as an assistant solicitor . At the same time, he helped his family, distributing carts with bread. Around 1870, McKabbin began attending evening classes in painting, and in 1871 he got a job as a student for five years in an art workshop engaged in painting crews. In 1872, he began to study at the School of Design at the National Gallery of Victoria with Thomas Clark , later with Oswald Rose Campbell and Eugene von Gerard ( English Eugene von Guerard ). McKubbin also attended the Victoria Academy of Arts and participated in its annual exhibitions. At the exhibition of 1880, he managed to sell his first painting.

In 1877, the artist's father died, and he had to take responsibility for the family baking business. He continued to study painting, already with the new director of the National Gallery of Victoria, George Frederick Folingsby ( born George Frederick Folingsby ), until 1885 .

Already the early works of McKabbin, performed by him during the training period, received favorable reviews from critics. If in the early works bearing imprints of Folingsby's influence, he mainly depicted urban landscapes, since 1884 the artist turned to rural Australia and began working in an open air , in a bush near Melbourne.

In 1885, together with their friend Tom Roberts, they created a camp for regular outdoor painting. Later they were joined by Arthur Streeton ( born Sir Arthur Ernest Streeton ) and George Rossi Ashton . Later, in 1891 , these artists became the core of the so-called Heidelberg school of painting , called so because they wrote their work near Heidelberg ( English Heidelberg ), a suburb of Melbourne. In 1886, McKubbin became a teacher at the Design School of the National Gallery of Victoria, and in the same year he became one of the founders of the Association of Australian Artists, formed by a group of artists who left the Victoria Academy of Art. In 1888, the Association and the Academy reunited to form the Victoria Society of Artists. In 1903 - 1904 and 1909, McCabin was elected president of the Society.

In 1889, he married Anna Moriarty. Their son, Louis Frederick , born in 1890 , later became director of the Art Gallery of South Australia . In addition to him, the family had six more children.

In 1893, the artist's first work, “Time to Feed the Birds,” was bought by the State Museum - the National Gallery of Victoria. Interestingly, this painting was later exchanged for another painting by McCabin and is currently in a private collection. In 1898, McCabin’s paintings were selected for an exhibition of Australian art in London. April 22, 1904 in Melbourne opened a large personal exhibition of the artist.

In 1907, for the first time in his life, Frederick McCabbin visited Europe , having been to England and France . Turner was greatly impressed by the work of Turner , whose influence is visible throughout the artist’s late work.

In 1915, McCabbin received news that his brother drowned in the wreck of a passenger ship, and his son Hugh was injured at Gallipoli . These messages undermined the artist’s health, after which he did not recover. In 1916, he resigned from his teaching position for thirty years, and on December 20, 1917, died of a heart attack in his home in South Yarre, a suburb of Melbourne. He was buried at Brighton cemetery in Melbourne.

McCabin’s works are in collections in all major Australian art museums, including the National Gallery of Australia . His painting "The Idyll of Bush" (1893) in 1998 was sold at auction for more than two million dollars, which is a record for Australian painting ^[4] . In 1989, one of the galleries of the Victoria Society of Artists was named Frederick McCabin. One of the artist’s paintings inspired Polixeni Papapetra to create a series of photographs “The Mysterious Country” (2006).

• “ On the Wallaby Trail ”

• Australian Department of Education website biography
• The works of Frederick McCabin
• David Thomas. McCubbin, Frederick (Fred) (1855 - 1917) (neopr.) . Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 11 pp 242-243. Melbourne University Press (1986). Date of treatment April 4, 2008. Archived March 29, 2012.