A Small Industry has emerged around the artist Frederick McCubbin (1855-1917) in the last twenty years. Reproductions of his highly-priced paintings decorate stamps, calendars, tea-towels and note-cards, and the Kit-Kat television commercial which feature Down on his Luck secured for his work a place in the popular imagination. A recent publication1 and exhibition2 have re-confirmed his place in the pantheon of Australian painting as a member of the Heidelberg School, which despite revisionism remains a tenacious cultural myth as the ‘birthplace’ of Australian painting.3 Such status, however, was not always assured. McCubbin's reputation was remarkably slight for a period of thirty years from the 1920s until the mid 1950s. Acknowledgement of his contribution to late nineteenth-century Australian art was eclipsed by the reputations of Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, a situation which McCubbin's family actively sought to redress. Drawing primarily upon the McCubbin family papers housed in the La Trobe Library, this article charts the role his family placed in developing, promoting and securing a public profile for his work. Their involvement included the organisation of commercial sales and the 1955 Retrospective Exhibition, and in the 1960s extended to an intervention into popular conceptions of Australian art history.

Insufficient attention is paid in much art-historical writing to the manner in which reputations are created. Reputation does not rest on the ‘quality’ of the art alone but relies on a complex interaction of personal networks, promotional tactics, sales, exhibitions, publications, grants and scholarly attention. Frederick McCubbin's art was first codified in the lavish tome The Art of Frederick McCubbin, published in Melbourne in 1916.4 This text is described by bibliophiles as one of the first luxury products of Australian art publishing, and the nationalist and mythologising tenor of the text has been acknowledged by several historians.5 Leigh Astbury first identified McCubbin's son, Alexander, as the unspecified editor of the monograph.6 The publication, with its glowing passages by J.S. MacDonald and Alexander McCubbin, received positive press and created a buoyant and receptive atmosphere for a sale of the artist's work.7 This is an early and typical example of the involvement of McCubbin's family in promotion which perhaps was not the artist's forte.

Other family members were involved with the promotion of McCubbin's work in the gallery context. As early as 1904, for instance, Frederick McCubbin wrote to Tom Roberts:

A similar reference occurs in correspondence dated 1907,9 and Andrew Mackenzie has noted that Fanny Withers and Annie McCubbin (the artist's wife) organised a large and successful showing of Frederick McCubbin's work in 1921.10 Such examples suggest a greater role for women in institutional structures of the late nineteenth-century Australian art world than has been presumed.

In 1919 son Alexander published Frederick McCubbin: A Consideration, the first in a series of ‘Australian Art Books’.11 This was the last text to be devoted to McCubbin's art for sixty years, until the appearance of Ann Galbally's Frederick McCubbin in 1981,12 Similarly, nearly forty years would pass upon the artist's death in 1917 before a restrospective exhibition was mounted. When ii eventuated in 1955 it was a thoroughly McCubbin-family enterprise. Louis McCubbin, recently retired as Head of the National Gallery of South Australia, prodded National Gallery of Victoria Director Daryl Lindsay's memory of an earlier undertaking, in 1951. Noting that he had already drafted a list of pictures and proposed loans, Louis wrote:

Y.13

It is interesting to observe that in contrast Roberts had received the accolade of a retrospective in 1932 only one year after his death; similarly Streeton a large retrospective of 135 works in 1944, one year after his. Louis' proposal for his father's show included fifty-one paintings.14 Many works which are well known today - Portrait - Study in White, Portrait - J. Panton Esq., Portrait - “Blue and Gold” (Mrs. Kozminsky) and Shelling Peas were still in the family's collection.15 With Louis' death in 1952 arrangements for the exhibition passed to brother Hugh, a Melbourne businessman. For several years Hugh nudged Daryl Lindsay's memory, suggesting a plan which was smaller than Louis'.16 The new proposal was based on the outline of McCubbin's oeuvre set out in the 1916 monograph, in which McCubbin's development was seen in terms of place - Box Hill, Blackburn, Brighton and Macedon - the sites where he painted. Hugh conceded that ‘Louis was working on a much more ambitious project’ and added, ‘before I die I would like to see the two great paintings of his life - ‘The Bush Burial’ and ‘Down on His Luck’ exhibited in the City [sic] of his birth'.17

Coincidental with his lobbying for an exhibition, Hugh commenced a media campaign to achieve recognition for his father's achievements. From February 1955 letters were forwarded to newspapers and broadcasters in several Australian stales. A letter to the editor of the Sydney Bulletin was typical:

There followed a summary which declared McCubbin a ‘Pioneer of Australian Art and the first notable Artist to be born in Australia’.19 As described in The Art of Frederick McCubbin (1916) it became a virtue to refuse the lure of expatriate experience: ‘Frederick McCubbin was the only notable artist of his time to spend the whole of his life in Victoria’, Hugh claimed, ignoring his father's overseas journey of 1907.20 Hugh linked his father with Tom Roberts rather than Arthur Streeton, claiming that ‘In Association with Tom Roberts [he] was a founder of the Australian School of Landscape Painting’.21

That it was indeed necessary to provide a synopsis of McCubbin's achievements was borne out by an unfortunate but amusing incident in which ABC Radio Brisbane broadcast not a eulogy but a birthday call. The following apology was received from Russ Tyson:

The McCubbin family fears that their father's memory had been neglected were grounded in reality. Compared with Roberts and Streeton, the paucity of publishing about McCubbin was striking. Art in Australia often featured work by the former pair, publishing a Streeton Number in 1919; The Arthur Streeton Catalogue was published in 1935 and R.H. Croll had published two books concerning Streeton and Roberts by the 1940s.23 Despite Bernard Smith's measured comments concerning McCubbin in Place, Taste and Tradition (1945), even Daryl Lindsay requested ‘a few more facts about his life - other than when he was born and when he was at he National Gallery School - to give out to the press’.24

The Frederick McCubbin Centenary Show was opened by Prime Minister Robert Menzies at the National Gallery of Victora on 4 November 1955.25 Hugh was asked to provide the vote of thanks, and his speech ran:

Menzies' presence was significant; McCubbin's painting was the type of art he wished to see enshrined in a pantheon of Australian art which revolved around landscape and rejected modernist practice.27 Hugh made several carefully chosen donations of McCubbin paintings and memorabilia at this time including the artist's easel (presented to the National Gallery)28 and a painting for the decoration of the Prime Minister's residence, The Lodge.29 The language of his correspondence with Menzies regarding this matter indicates a friendship; the Prime Minister selected the Sketch of Princes Bridge over three landscapes which Hugh described as ‘in the old Man's best manner’.30

Also in the centenary year, An Exhibition and Sale of a Small collection of paintings by Frederick Mccubbin (1859-1917) and Louis McCubbin (1889-1952) was held in mid 1955 at Joshua McClelland's rooms, Melbourne. Hugh provided the anonymous catalogue essay31 and sales receipts indicate that all works were from the collection of either Hugh or his sisters.32 of his father, Hugh wrote, perhaps prematurely:

In appropriating the latter statement, which was generally appended to the work of Arthur Streeton, Hugh hinted at the bitterness the family may have felt regarding the ascendancy and attention accorded Streeton. A cult for McCubbin did not exist, and prices were relatively low. A 1949 sale realised an average of £22 per painting, and in 1950 a nude by Louis sold for more than one of his father's landscapes.34 The substantial work Williamstown Landscape was purchased from Louis by the National Gallery of South Australia in 1952 for the relatively low price of 175 guineas.35 Streeton's prices were considerably higher, reflecting the prestige accorded him. The Historic Memorials committee - of which Louis was a member - for instance, purchased Streeton's A Pastoral for £500 in 1952.36

By The 1960s the bitterness regarding the self-promotion of Arthur Streeton became oven. A ‘Symposium or Judicial Enquiry’ was organised by Hugh at the Melbourne Savage Club on 31 August 1962, ‘to determine’, as the reminders stated, ‘a Matter of the Utmost [sic] Importance in the History of Art in Australia’.37 The debate revolved around a spirited attack on Heidelberg as the birthplace of a purely Australian art and exposed the way in which Heidelberg and Streeton had developed synonymous and privileged meanings. Hugh's motivation for the enterprise was clarified in a letter he wrote during the planning stages:

It was unfair and simplistic to blame Streeton entirely for this situation. His supporter Lionel Lindsay had argued as early as 1917 that Streeton was the ‘discoverer’ of the Australian landscape39 later christening him ‘the greatest of the pioneers, and the first of the native born to paint a great and typical Australian picture’40 ‘a veritable priest of Apollo’.41

The Savage Club had a long connection with Frederick McCubbin. He had been a member and by 1951 the Club owned at least two paintings by the artist.42 The Club had commemorated McCubbin in March 1955, when ‘Savage’ E.C. Rigby delivered an address describing the artist's home as ‘the resort of artists, lawyers, musicians and other of the intelligencia [sic] of Melbourne’.43 The Enquiry hosted in 1962, however, was more complex; at once jovial and serious it is a fascinating document of contemporary conceptions of Australian art history. A mock trial was held, witnesses called, exhibits displayed and a team representing McCubbin and Box Hill battled one representing Streeton and Heidelberg. Hugh McCubbin briefed George Lush and Austin Asche, attorneys ‘acting’ for his father, and typescripts of the questions they fired at ‘witnesses’, including art historian Professor Joseph Burke, survive.44 Dominating the proceedings was a copy of Streeton's article published in the Argus, October 1934, in which he created the impression that he was barely acquainted with McCubbin; that McCubbin was peripheral to the group including Streeton, Roberts and Conder which had ‘created’ Australian art.45 McCubbin's brief to the Box Hill side claimed that the article ‘seems an inaccurate, gratuitous and unnecessary slight to a man who three or four years before was one of those who introduced Streeton to a new field of knowledge’.46 The aim of the enquiry was apparent; to revive McCubbin's reputation and to chastise Arthur Streeton, albeit in a jovial manner.

Witnesses were called in order to prove that Heidelberg was not the site of the first plein-air painting camp as Streeton had claimed, but that Box Hill deserved the honor.47 A botanist was shown a number of paintings and asked to identify the various eucalypts. The Box Hill Town Clerk was also present and was asked:

His presence was probably an outcome of the efforts of McCubbin's daughter, Kathleen Mangan, who corresponded with the shire in an attempt to pinpoint the exact location of the Box Hill painting camp. Like her brother, she was keen to demote Heidelberg's pretensions and had written, ‘I, for one, would be most happy to see this historical fact cleared up, and see Box Hill given as the true, and original site’.49

The facts that were considered essential in displacing Streeton's version of events revolved around detailed discussions of the eucalypt, and it was never questioned that from landscape alone a quintessentially Australian school might emerge. The Savage Club trial failed to question both the concept of what ‘Australian art’ might be and the necessity to identify a point of genesis of Australian painting. A typescript amongst the evening's papers, which may have been read to the Assembly, does, however, demonstrate a sharp understanding of the mythic proportions the ‘Heidelberg School’ had assumed in Australian culture. Unpublished to date, it is worth quoting at length as it indicates that the myth of the Heidelberg School had become sufficiently paradigmatic that by the early 1960s it could be successfully parodied:

Hugh McCubbin had described it as his ‘filial duty’ to attack the hegemony of the Heidelberg School which positioned Arthur Streeton at its summit. The crusade on behalf of his father was marked by bitterness at Streeton's self-advertisement in the 1920s and subsequent ascendancy. At no time, however, was the noting of a ‘National School’ of Australian landscape challenged, for this was the very framework in which Louis and Hugh were to position their father as a pioneering figure. Their enterprise did not subvert the myth of the Heidelberg School; in arguing for a reassessment of it in which their father would be accorded new prominence, it was further consolidated.