M E McGuire: Clarice Beckett
The Silver Thread By M E Mcguire
When the artist Clarice Beckett was born in 1887, she had a five-year old brother, Thomas Alfred Joseph, listed on her birth certificate. He thereafter disappears from the family history. According to her sister Hilda, the third and last-born, there had once been a boy but he had died young, as indeed so many did in the late 19th c. New evidence shows that Hilda, who long outlived her family, hid or forgot what she did know when Rosalind Hollinrake interviewed her in 1970. (Rosalind is deservedly known as Clarice’s champion.) It is an unhappy family secret that leads us to a closer understanding of the artist, why she was so intensely private and self-reliant, why she remained so bonded to her parents and committed to her solitary profession.
In the Church of England section of the Boroondara Cemetery, Kew, lies the unmarked grave of a seventeen year old boy who died of tuberculosis in the Metropolitan Lunatic Asylum on the eleventh of December 1899. Deaths at the Asylum in Kew required an inquest not for research purposes but to demonstrate the death was in no way caused by mistreatment or malpractice. Thomas had food in his belly and no marks of violence. While TB was the immediate cause of death he also had an untreatable congenital intellectual disability. The Coroner’s Report was duly presented ‘upon the oaths’ of five ‘good and lawful men of Kew’ to ‘our Sovereign Lady Queen Victoria … in the Sixty-third year of the Reign of our said Lady the Queen for Victoria’. The next day, two weeks before Christmas, his body was consigned to the grave by the Vicar of the Holy Trinity Church in Kew. Clarice was twelve years old.
The Becketts may have attended the funeral but the death certificate, registered on the day he was buried, suggests otherwise. It was signed by the Coroner and a male member of the staff at Kew who had been present at the post-mortem. His father and mother were declared ‘Unknown’. The meticulous record keeping at the Asylum clearly identifies Thomas’ parents. Alongside Thomas’ grave, marked only by a broken stone border, lies room for at least two more burials under the green grass. Joseph Beckett must have bought the ground for a family plot but his declining fortunes and the shame of bearing a defective boy dragging at his heels combined to leave the unmarked grave alone.
The Becketts were gentry in country Victoria, Joseph Beckett had emigrated from England with his mother when he was a boy. (His father disappeared to America.) Set to work in a bank, he rose through the ranks to become the Manager of the Colonial Bank in Casterton. The steady growth in wool prices ensured his and the country town’s prosperity. In his mid-twenties, sporting a broad and carefully curled moustache, he happily fitted into the upper echelons of country society, playing cricket, frequenting race meetings and attending the Anglican Church. As Hilda recalled bankers, lawyers and doctors had considerable status, especially in a remote country town. Kate as the great granddaughter of ‘Como Brown’ had her own social clout and a wide circle of acquaintance. Christened Elizabeth Kate Brown, the brevity of her second name suited her forthright practicality and she was always called Kate. Raised with the polite accomplishments of Victorian womanhood she was working as a governess to the squattocracy when one of her sisters, a doctor’s wife in Casterton introduced the pair. They married with ceremony in Melbourne in 1881 and returned to live above the bank in the main street of Casterton with two servants.
Thomas was born at home a year later. Kate and Joseph must soon have become aware something was very wrong with their boy and probably took care to keep him out of the public gaze. This would have been possible in their home above the bank and the enclosed garden behind it. They must have turned for advice to the local doctor, perhaps Kate’s brother-in-law. Given the propensity for gossip in a small remote community, some at least must have known of the damaged boy but respected the Beckett’s social standing and their need for discretion. (Their servants were devoted to Kate but found Joseph high-handed.) When Thomas was about two years old, modernity in the form of a train arrived in Casterton, radically lessening the expense of time, discomfort and money travelling to booming Melbourne. The Becketts no doubt took part in the spectacle attending the opening of their new station, the western terminus for the colony.
Modernity also made its mark in the first decade of Thomas’ life when ‘inebriates’ were removed from lunatic asylums and distinctions were drawn between ‘lunatics’, those with a mental illness, and ‘idiots’ and ‘imbeciles’, those like Thomas with a disability. Collins St in Melbourne boasted the consulting room of a new ‘alienist’, a doctor qualified to certify lunatics for incarceration. It was common enough for upper class families to ‘put away’ defectives in Kew or its sister institutions in Ararat and Beechworth and would be so for some generations to come. The colonial asylums had begun life as part of the reforms to mental care in the mid nineteenth century. The colony of ‘Our Queen Victoria’ had built Yarra Bend Asylum, following a pattern of building asylums on the bend of a river so patients could be safely transported away from crowded streets. By the time the grand new asylum above the Yarra was built in 1878 there were over a thousand inmates. For many years, the suburb of Kew, as Dr Reg Ellery wrote, was dominated by its asylum and cemetery, ‘sanctuaries where the disintegration of the mind and the destruction of the body are imperturbably accomplished’.
Having built one of the biggest asylums anywhere behind the longest façade in the southern hemisphere, the government hoped it would be largely self-sufficient with its farm, gardens, carpentry workshops, blacksmith, morgue and water tanks housed under the three turrets studding the skyline. On meagre funding staff morale and standards were low. There was no research, no medication and no special training for the medical officers or the attendants. Few patients were cured. One list from Kew at the time shows about half died, half were transferred to the country asylums, one only was cured and released, and one, written with a flourishing ‘E’, escaped. (Incarcerated for seven years Michael Baldwin must have been one of the patients regarded as able and amenable enough to work on the farm outside the unscaleable walls when he escaped in 1889.)
Five long years passed before Clarice was born by which time it was clear that Kate was the dominant partner in the marriage and that Joseph increasingly leaned on her. Their relief at bearing a child of sound mind and body soon turned to some anxiety. The new baby was found to have a faulty valve in her heart but she prospered. Her parents accepted she would always have a weakened heart and be more than usually subject to the common illnesses of children. It is possible that Thomas was farmed out to the care of a nurse or nanny elsewhere in Casterton, but Kate seems to have been his primary carer. With servants to do the housekeeping, it is likely Kate kept him at home with her raising him as best she could. He would have been much confined to the nursery and under the supervision of the housemaid when she was busy with society.
The boy couldn’t be taught to speak, to read, write, sing, or feed himself. He could walk alone but could not run. As Clarice grew she would have learnt to communicate with him as her mother did, reading his responses, anticipating his needs. She became an intensely observant and acutely sensitive child, witness to her mother’s unhappiness and her brother’s frustrations. She would have felt the contrast between herself and Thomas, doubly valuing her ability to read and taking refuge and strength from her reading. She followed her mother’s painting lessons with a Mr Rodda with great interest and Kate encouraged her talent for drawing. (Joseph was inclined to be jealous of Mr Rodda.) Kate wrote and illustrated a fairy story for her daughters. As a surprise, a special cubbyhouse was made for Clarice in the garden, strictly her own retreat. Emulating her mother’s romantic inclinations, Clarice dubbed it Rosamund’s Bower for one of her beautiful dolls. (In English history Rosamund’s Bower was a hideaway for Henry 11’s mistress, Fair Rosamund. He used a silver thread to guide him through the maze of shrubberies enclosing her seclusion.)
In February 1891 Thomas was placed for three months at Kew Asylum. Kate was preoccupied with a new baby. Joseph and he probably made the long journey from Casterton to the city in a private compartment in the train and pulled up in a carriage in front of the entrance. Diagnosed as a ‘congenital idiot’ caused by ‘Nukuavre’, Thomas was placed in Kew Cottages, recently built to house children separately from adults after a Royal Commission into the parlous state of the State asylum and its inmates. The Becketts would have paid the fees ensuring the best possible treatment for him and perhaps hoped that his stay might lead to some improvement. Thomas returned to Casterton where he remained for another eight years. Then it would be his mother who made the miserable journey with him back to Kew in February 1899.
That Kate had two growing girls to marry well may have been one of her considerations, grown pressing now that Thomas was maturing. He could well have become too much for her to handle. This time he was admitted to the asylum with the adults. Here, in two great wards, male and female patients were housed separately. They were barricaded further into paying, closest to the front and furthest from trouble, non-paying behind them and at the back the bluestone cells for the unmanageable. To the question, ‘is the patient of clean habits’, Kate declared him ‘Dirty’. (He may have added inappropriate sexual activity to his list of dirty habits.) He was not suicidal, destructive or otherwise dangerous. His sight and hearing were imperfect, he could speak only one or two words and feed himself a little with a spoon. His health is described as ‘Indifferent’, neither good nor bad. According to his mother there was no known history of insanity in the family. Finally she nominated Joseph as his next of kin, naming him the father and Bank Manager, Casterton.
For six months in unhappy Kew Thomas remained in ‘fair bodily health’ though he showed ‘no mental improvement’ in his ‘feeble mind’. In August the Medical Officer noted some bleeding from the nose and a dull right lung. He was confined to bed on the fourteenth of October with a rising temperature. ‘He gradually sank’, dying on the 11th of December. The Becketts in far away Casterton could have been notified by a telegram or phone call. There is no way of knowing if they attended his funeral. That they did not themselves register his death suggests they remained in Casterton.
Circumstances silencing Thomas’ existence were playing into their hands. In Casterton rumour had it that Joseph was drinking heavily. Kate turned her attention to her daughters. She took them to be photographed without Papa. Kate is seated with Hilda by her side and Clarice standing behind them both. Dark-haired Kate shows a determined nose and long chin, her chiselled features thrown into relief above the high-necked white blouse. Hilda in a velveteen dress and white collar promises to look very like her. Clarice, at the apex, seems suspended between them protecting them both. Dressed similarly to Hilda with the large white collar bordered with lace, but fair like her father, she has a softer, rounder face and a generous mouth, the only one suggesting a smile. When she completed her schooling at Casterton Primary, the parents decided to send her to board at Queen’s College in Ballarat, a popular choice with the gentry of the Western Districts. It was a new century and Clarice for the first time lived away from her mother.
When Kate was told Clarice had caught measles, she busied herself moving to Ballarat. She was horrified to hear that the school sent the worse cases to the local hospital. She would trust no institution with Clarice’s health. Her concern for her second child and her distrust of medical institutions are doubly understandable. She was glad to get away from Casterton and its reminders of Thomas and relieved to part company with her troubled husband. She took a house in Ballarat and Clarice was reunited with her mother and sister. They would never return to live in Casterton.
Kate made the most of their new life in a bigger bustling town. Melbourne was a comparatively short train ride away and the Becketts were always welcome at her sister’s home in Melbourne, a Mrs Pinnock (a good friend to Clarice and one of the few mourners at her funeral). The girls took dancing lessons and Clarice had her first formal art lessons in charcoal drawing by a Miss Eva Hopkins. Some three years passed before Joseph was transferred to a lesser position in a much larger branch of the Colonial Bank in Melbourne and the family were reunited in a home in elegant South Yarra opposite Fawkner Park. He and his bank in Casterton had survived the bank crashes of the 1890s but he was finding it difficult to adjust to the bureaucratic changes wrought in its wake. Clarice completed her schooling with a year at Merton Hall, a privileged Anglican school for girls. It was 1904 and an American actress, Tittel Brune arrived to much publicity. The ship bringing them into Melbourne had run aground in Port Phillip Bay and its passengers and crew rescued in dangerous circumstances. Brune was playing the lead in a play about Napoleon’s son, a demanding role of five acts and one hundred and thirty pages of script to deliver at an emotional pitch. Intrigued, Clarice read the actress’ self-revelations in the papers. Brune combined her career with a life sustained by her religious views, she was she said ‘half a nun’. The Merton schoolgirl learnt by her example. It was possible to be a progressive, professional artist and not defy social conventions. She was herself inclined to be half a nun and retain her freedom of mind.
The Becketts moved to 22 Kensington Rd above the river and running down to Kate’s old familial home, Como House. Their social highlight in 1905 was Clarice’s debut. Her parents had high hopes of a prosperous marriage for her, a pretty gentle creature, she was meeting some of the more eligible young men of good family. Clarice disliked all the fuss of fittings and formals. Free of schooling, she had begun to explore Melbourne’s bookshops, from Coles Arcade where she became friendly with the poet Furnley Maurice to the dingier secondhand bookshops tucked away in the city. The poet’s pseudonym, made from the place names Fern Tree Gully and Beaumauris, chimes with the territory Clarice would make her own in painting. Later Gino Nibbi, the erudite Italian bookseller who ran ‘The Leonardo’ in Collins St, would declare Clarice the best-read woman in Melbourne, reading which must have included the new English writing on modern art by Roger Fry and others. Meanwhile Joseph was extremely unhappy at the city bank, missing the familiar work of a country banker. He attended a ‘nerve specialist’ in Collins St and was soon relocated to relieving duties at country branches.
Clarice continued to reject the offers of eligible young men. When she was about twenty-four, Joseph was transferred to Bendigo where they would stay until his retirement after the Great War. Here the Becketts turned their attention on her more gregarious, sports-loving sister. Clarice commuted to Melbourne often staying with Mrs Pinnock until 1914 when she decided, with her parent’s agreement, to enrol at the National Gallery School in Swanston St and live in town. Hilda joined her and for a year they lived at the boarding house, Elenara, in Fitzroy St St Kilda. The school was housed along the Russell St side of the Art Gallery and Clarice often made her way to the galleries to look again at the little Corot painting ’The Bent Tree’. Like Corot she would be content to work over the same territiory.
Clarice’s critics who castigated her paintings for their lack of linear definition, might have been surprised to know she was given the prize in first year for her drawing. She was lucky enough to be taught by Fred McCubbin and his was a lasting, painterly influence. McCubbin retired in 1917 and Clarice felt she had learnt all that the school could teach her. In Bendigo, Walter Withers recommended Max Meldrum’s new classes devoted to tonal painting. Clarice attended his studio classes for a year, commuting to Melbourne.
1917 was the worst year of the war and country towns like Bendigo were counting the toll of young men lost. While Hilda knitted socks for the soldiers, Clarice was reading Furnley Maurice’s anti-war tirade, ‘To God, From the Warring Nations’. It is from this time that Clarice and Hilda began living separate lives. When, after another world war and some thirty-five years after Clarice’s death, Hilda was Rosalind’s main source for the Beckett family history, the problem that she knew so little of their later lives is compounded by her anxiety to shield her father from accusations that he drank too much and that Clarice’s adult life remain veiled by propriety. The family tact that began by ruling Thomas out of the picture became a fixed pattern.
At thirty years old in 1917 Clarice had very definite ideas about what she wanted to paint. She had learnt what she needed from Meldrum, an experimental approach to tonal painting, and began working out of doors. She would transform the Heidelberg tradition by abandoning literary or moral meanings and imaging the modern city, mobile and electric, and new motifs of the signs of suburbia, the telegraph poles and petrol pumps that irritated her critics. In 1919 the Becketts retired to a new home in Dalgety St in bayside Beaumauris where Clarice would become a familiar figure working at her easel. Here the family lived for the first time without servants. In 1922 Hilda married the son of family friends, Tom Mangan, subsequently moving to the Mallee along with other soldier-settlers scrubbing out unprofitable farming land. The only Clarice Hilda would happily remember was the young woman, passionate about poetry and music and enamoured of misty effects transcribed in paint.
In 1923 Clarice began her annual exhibitions at the Athenaeum Gallery in Collins St, won respect in Melbourne art circles and found patronage despite the general negativity of her newspaper critics, especially Blamire Young. (Her record of annual Spring exhibitions 1923-33, active participation in annual group shows, notably the Melbourne Society of Women Painters, and the abundant reviews attending each of her exhibitions is unmatched by her peers.) Viewing her 1926 exhibition the playwright Louis Esson wondered to Nettie Palmer that such unassuming pictures should fetch such abuse. Clarice showed remarkable freedom of mind in choosing her subjects. No other Meldrumite thought of painting Luna Park and indeed no other artist painted Pavlova as she performed alone on stage in her tutu of real swan feathers. For the next decade Clarice made enough from her sales to continue to work as she chose until the Great Depression took its toll on her. Moreover in 1934, a new wave of modernism at the Athenaeum Gallery, heralded by Arnold Shore, Jock Frater and the redoubtable Mrs Ivy Tweddle, favoured angular lines and bold colours. It was only George Bell reviewing her last exhibitions in the early thirties who sensed a greater purpose in her work, what he called a sense of design being given expression. It was too little too late.
Clarice continued as well as she could with diminishing resources, believing her paintings could, as music seemed to do, speak for themselves but nobody much seemed to be listening. The ambition of her late work such as the composite masterpiece in the ANG ‘Sandringham Beach’ of 1933 went unsung. Beckett was all too easily sidelined then and sentimentalised now. Significantly not a scrap of her private writing remains to contradict the stereotype of the dutiful daughter-artist mutely accepting her subservience to man and nature. Her late achievement, like her personality, remains in the shadows.
‘Sandringham Beach’ shows the sophistication of her painterly skills and how far she had built on Meldrum’s doctrine of pure painting, taking his tonal theory through to the liberation of colour and sunlight. This argument for her development is also well supported by eighteen oil paintings on paper donated by Hilda and stored in splendid black boxes at the ANG. It was from such pristine abstractions, complete in themselves, that she created ‘Sandringham Beach’, an ordinary day at the beach, moments in time transfigured and fugitive, a shifting fragmented world where aloneness is the only constant and ambiguity the human condition.
In January 1934 Kate Beckett suffered a stroke and Clarice nursed her for three weeks before she died, leaving Clarice alone with her arthritic, peevish father. (Clarice’s friends, never much to Joseph’s taste, were not welcome.) In the winter of 1935, just eighteen months after her mother’s death, Clarice caught pneumonia and died in hospital. A small private funeral was held the next day and she was buried close by Kate in the Cheltenham New Cemetery. The next month Joseph died and was buried with his wife. On the other side of town, Thomas lay apart forgotten by all except as a distant memory for Hilda and a persistent haunting quality in the best of Clarice Beckett’s paintings, the fine line they thread between illumination and annihilation.
Endnotes
Kew Asylum records, Public Records Office Victoria
Booroondara Cemetery Trust
Clarice Beckett’s paintings in the Australian National Gallery, the most comprehensive collection begun with acquisitions from Rosalind’s exhibitions in the 1970s.
Rosalind Hollinrake ‘Clarice Beckett The Artist and Her Circle’, Retrospective Catalogue ‘Politically Incorrect’.
In 1982 Rosalind allowed me access to her correspondence from Hilda Mangan and Colin Colohan.
My MA thesis ‘The Singular Career of Clarice Beckett’ (Fine Arts Melbourne) University was completed in 1984 and an essay ‘Life and Your Imagining’ subsequently published in an academic journal.
Reg Ellery ‘The Cow Jumped Over the Moon, private papers of a psychiatrist’ Cheshire Melbourne 1956
Nettie Palmer ‘Fourteen Years’ Meanjin Press 1948
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