Luna Park

Clarice Beckett
Luna Park 1919
oil on board
Art Gallery of South Australia Gift of Alastair Hunter OAM and the late Tom Hunter in memory of Elizabeth through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 2019
Image courtesy of Art Gallery of South Australia

Beckett’s singular ability to capture the fleeting effects of movement and atmosphere had critics like Percy Leason—one of her most ardently supportive—expressing disbelief ‘that anyone could fail to respond to something that is so strong, so sensitive and refined. It should move even Miss Beckett's somewhat hostile critics to acknowledge, at least in part, her very remarkable talent and sincerity and the rare beauty of her pictures.’ [Table Talk, 3 March 1932]

Beckett’s technical brilliance was the combined result of an innate aptitude for art—recognised in her high-school years—and her mature age studies in academic drawing under Frederick McCubbin at the National Gallery School from 1914–16, and a brief tutelage under, but career-long association with, Max Meldrum in his independent school in 1917.

Beckett’s grounding in drawing and her powers of observation mean that in two or three painterly marks she conveys the rush of a red-coated woman crossing the street outside Luna Park. This early work also reveals Beckett’s idiosyncratic eye for composition, here as if capturing a scene from her peripheral vision.