Frederick McCubbin

Frederick McCubbin
Australian 1855–1917

Collins Street c. 1915
oil on canvas on cardboard
Geelong Gallery
HP Douglass Bequest Fund, 1945

Collins Street has long been regarded as one of Melbourne’s most fashionable and cosmopolitan streets. As one of the principal east-west thoroughfares in Robert Hoddle’s original city grid of 1837, it is the address of some of the city’s most exclusive retailers and clubs, as well as medical, financial and cultural institutions, and was the subject of various paintings from Frederick McCubbin’s later years.

Several decades after this panel was completed, McCubbin’s daughter recalled her father’s fondness for Collins Street, having accompanied him on painting trips, while he worked from the back seat of the family’s second-hand Renault rapidly applying paint with a palette knife to depict the grand architecture and bustling traffic of the elegant boulevard.