Frederick McCubbin

Frederick McCubbin (25 February 1855 - 20 December 1917) was an Australian painter who was prominent in the famous Heidelberg School, one of the most important periods in Australia's visual arts history.

Born in Melbourne, the third of eight children of a baker, McCubbin worked for a time as solicitor's clerk, a coach painter, and in his family's bakery business while studying art at the National Gallery of Victoria's School of Design, where he met Tom Roberts and studied under Eugene von Gerard. He also studied at the Victorian Academy of the Arts, and in 1876 and from 1879 to 1882 exhibited there, selling his first painting in 1880. In this period, with the death of his father he became responsible for running the family business.

By the early 1880s, his work began to attract considerable attention and won a number of prizes from the National Gallery, including a 30-pound first prize in 1883 in their annual student exhibition, and by the mid-1880s began to concentrate more on the works of the Australian bush that made him most famous.

In 1888, he became Master of the School of Design at the National Gallery. In this position he taught a number of students who themselves became prominent Australian artists, including Charles Conder and Arthur Streeton.

He continued to paint through the first two decades of the 20th century, though by the beginning of World War I his health began to fail. He traveled to England in 1907 and visited Tasmania, but aside from these relatively short excursions lived most of his life in Melbourne.

McCubbin married Annie Moriarty in 1889. They had seven children, of whom their son Louis also became an artist.