McCubbin | Down on his Luck

About Down on his Luck by Frederick McCubbin

Down on his Luck painting, in short: painted by Frederick McCubbin in 1889 near the Box Hill artists' camp outside Melbourne; oil on canvas, 114.5 × 152.5 cm; bought by the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1896 and still in its collection in Perth. The model was the painter Louis Abrahams.

McCubbin painted Down on his Luck in 1889 at the artists' camp at Box Hill, on the outskirts of Melbourne. A swagman sits by a small fire in the scrub, hat pushed back, staring at nothing. His billy is beside him. Nobody else is in the picture.

The man was not a swagman. He was Louis Abrahams, a fellow painter and friend, posing in borrowed clothes — which does nothing to reduce the picture's force. Australia was sliding towards the depression of the 1890s, and the figure of the man walking the country looking for work he would not find was becoming a familiar one.

What makes it more than an illustration of hard times is the bush. McCubbin gives roughly two-thirds of the canvas to dry scrub that has no focal point, no clearing, no path out — just an even, endless tangle of grey-green. The man is not resting in a landscape. He is enclosed by one. It hangs in the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth.

Own a hand-painted Down on his Luck

Most of this canvas is bush, and McCubbin painted it the way it actually is — hundreds of small dry strokes of olive, grey and dull brown, none of them leading anywhere, with no clearing and no focal point to rest on. That scrubby, non-composing surface is the whole point: it is what encloses the man. It is also precisely the kind of dense small-scale detail that reproduction averages away, blurring into a soft brown-green wash that reads as generic woodland from anywhere in the world. Painted by hand in oils, the individual strokes survive, and the bush stays recognisably Australian — dry, scratchy and closed in.