Tonal realism artists biography

1910s art movement

Australian tonalism was an art movement that emerged in Melbourne during the 1910s. Known at the time as tonal realism or Meldrumism, the movement was founded by artist and art teacher Max Meldrum, who developed a unique theory of painting, the "Scientific Order of Impressions".

He argued that painting was a pure science of optical analysis, and believed that a painter should aim to create an exact illusion of spatial depth by carefully observing in nature tone and tonal relationships (shades of light and dark) and spontaneously recording them in the order that they had been received by the eye.^[1]

Meldrum's followers—among the most notable being Clarice Beckett, Colin Colahan and William Frater—began staging group exhibitions at the Melbourne Athenaeum in 1919.^[2] They favoured painting in adverse weather conditions, and often went out together in the morning or towards evening in search of fog and wintry wet