Summer fields

Clarice Beckett
Summer fields 1926
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

In Summer fields, a shimmering mirage activated by the setting sun across an open field is a complex register of subtle tonal shifts in a composition with an absorbing depth of field. A cluster of trees, perhaps fragments of the windbreaks that typically delineate Western District pastureland, leads the eye across vast blonde paddocks towards a vaporous horizon line and the vibrant arc of the setting sun, gently blending into the sky.

In 1971, forty-five years after it was painted, Summer fields was exhibited at Rosalind Humphries Galleries, Melbourne (in the first significant display of the artist’s work since the 1936 memorial exhibition staged soon after her death). The artist Fred Williams—who himself later transformed the way we see the Australian landscape—visited the 1971 exhibition and wrote that day in his diary: ‘She really was ahead of her time.’