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Lot Essay
Painted just outside Melbourne at Macedon, where McCubbin and his family had bought a cottage in 1901, and where they lived for most of the year until McCubbin's portrait commissions drew them back to town in late 1906, the present work (the original frame bears a plaque with the title 'Woodcutter') is one of two pictures (along with The Wood Sawyer, Shepparton Art Gallery) painted by McCubbin in 1907 showing the artist's eldest son Louis 'Chunk' McCubbin sawing timber in the bush on Mount Macedon. Two further pictures of similar subjects by McCubbin followed in 1908 (Woodcutters) and 1910 (Bush Sawyers). While clearly influenced by Millet's The Wood Sawyers, which McCubbin knew from a postcard, these bush subjects from the early 1900s have been seen as instigating a current of nationalism in Australian painting, further appropriating a subject to the canon of Australian art which we had already seen essayed in Tom Robert's Woodsplitters (1886) and in Streeton's The Selector's Hut and Conder's Under a southern sun, the two companion pictures painted at Heidelberg in 1890. The highest keyed of these four woodcutting pictures by McCubbin, the present lot embodies Robert Hughes's later observations of the artist's work from this Macedon period, latterly seen as one of the highpoints of the artist's career: 'McCubbin's presentation is more overtly sentimental than Roberts's, and a good deal more obviously nationalistic. ... But he was a Janus; his sentimentality and early fondness for irrelevant detail faced back to the English academies, but his rendition of light and atmosphere came, in a limited way, closer to real impressionism than either Streeton's or Roberts's. He dissolved form in a tapestry of all-over light effects. Significantly, he did not use the square brush, which defined planes. His surfaces are crusts of juxtaposed dabs and dots, overlapping, overpainted, and generally close-toned ... in his Macedon landscapes of the early 1900s, he heightened his colour; the pinks and blues and lime-greens, touched by the autumn sunlight, were often very sweet.' (The Art of Australia, 1966).
Probably bought off the walls of McCubbin's selling exhibition in Melbourne in 1907 by Golda Abrahams, the widow of McCubbin's great friend Louis Abrahams (for whom McCubbin named his first son, who is portrayed here), the picture has descended to the Abrahams' great-grandchildren and has, since its original purchase, only been more widely known from the colour plate in the 1916 monograph.
Probably bought off the walls of McCubbin's selling exhibition in Melbourne in 1907 by Golda Abrahams, the widow of McCubbin's great friend Louis Abrahams (for whom McCubbin named his first son, who is portrayed here), the picture has descended to the Abrahams' great-grandchildren and has, since its original purchase, only been more widely known from the colour plate in the 1916 monograph.