William B. McInnes

W. R. Sedon, Esq., Melbourne
Tom Silver Gallery, Melbourne
Purchased from the above in 1982

W. B. McInnes Memorial Loan Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, 5 July – 4 August 1940, cat. 29, lent by W. R. Sedon Esq.
W. B. McInnes Memorial Loan Exhibition, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2 September – 14 October 1940, cat. 48, lent by W. R. Sedon Esq.
Australian Paintings 1850 - 1950, Deutscher Fine Art, October – November 1982, cat. 52

Alexander Colqhoun, The Work of W. Beckwith McInnes, Melbourne: Alexander McCubbin, 1920

There is a 3cm area of paint loss (upper left) against the frame rebate and an intermittent horizontal crack through the sky (upper left). The work is otherwise in good stable condition.
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The rise of W. B. McInnes's reputation to that of 'the very front rank of Australian painters in oil [was] astoundingly rapid.'   Following his return from several years' study in Europe, in 1916 he succeeded Frederick McCubbin as drawing master at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, and his pastoral landscapes began to attract the interest of collectors such as Sir Baldwin Spencer, Dame Nellie Melba and a particular enthusiast, S. Grainger Esq.  In 1918 he was award the Wynne Prize for landscape and won the first of his seven Archibald Prizes.

The present work is from this period of his first public acclaim, and is a particularly fine example of his paintings of the late 1910s.

McInnes built himself a house on the Yarra at Alphington, and the Kew and Heidelberg river flats nearby were an important source of inspiration.  This view is from a few kilometres further upstream at Warrandyte, another favourite painting spot, the subject falling somewhere between the Australian Impressionists' matter-of-fact bathing scenes and the art nouveau-symbolist dryads and mermaids of Sidney Long and Rupert Bunny.

J. S. MacDonald once remarked that McInnes 'saw his subjects in shapes of tone and colour; planes with edges sharp or blunted; masses, patches and strips of light and shade, to be woven into a pictorial whole with the brush.'²  MacDonald's description certainly fits the tonal and chromatic poetry of Bathers, with its dappled patterns of sun on trees, earth, water and skin.  However, it is the Streetonesque bravura brushwork which impresses most; it is, in the words of Alexander Colquhoun, 'demonstrative, virile and confident, and full of that seductive charm pertaining to paint put on direct and unmessed.'³

1.  Bertram Stevens, 'William Beckwith McInnes", in W.B. McInnes: catalogue of his oilcolor landscapes, Sydney: Gayfield Shaw's Gallery, 1920
2.  J.S. MacDonald, 'W.B. McInnes(1889-1939), in W. B. McInnes Memorial Loan Exhibition, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1940, p. 1
3.  Alexander Colqhoun, The Work of W. Beckwith McInnes, Melbourne: Alexander McCubbin, 1920 (n.p.)