Works included in this catalogue
Meldrum Study from the Nude {1902} Loc? [PA]
Meldrum after Tintoretto Portrait of a Gentleman {1903} Loc? [PA]
Meldrum arrived in Australia with his family as a teenager, and enrolled in the National Gallery School in 1892, winning the NGV Travelling Scholarship in 1899. He worked in Paris and Edinburgh, and sent back several paintings under the terms of his award, including the two pre-Felton works listed above (neither extant in the Melbourne collection).
Other scholarship works produced by Meldrum were a copy after Veronese made in the Louvre in 1902 or later (yet to be identified, and not certainly acquired before 1905), and A Peasant of Pacé (1908), presented to the NGV in 1912.
After returning to Melbourne in 1912, he opened an art school in Collins Street in 1915, teaching various younger artists, notably Clarice Becket (1887-1935), and establishing himself as the leading advocate for Tonalism in Australia. In 1916-17, he was elected President of the Victorian Artists’ Society, and from 1937 to 1950 he was an NGV Trustee, a position he frequently used to argue against modernist acquisitions for the collection.
A number of Meldrum’s paintings, acquired after 1904, are held in the NGV.
Refs.
For the artist, see http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/meldrum-duncan-max-7553 (by Joyce McGrath & Bernard Smith; published in ADB vol.10, 1986; mentioning the copy after Veronese); and https://www.daao.org.au/bio/max-meldrum/. For the NGV’s current holdings of Meldrum’s work, see https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/?type=collection&s=Meldrum ; for A Peasant of Pacé, see https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/5930/. See also Arthur Cook, “Max Duncan Meldrum,” Quarterly Bulletin of the NGV vol.XI, no.2, 1952 (unpaginated); available online: https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/The-Quarterly-Bulletin-of-the-National-Gallery-of-Victoria-vol-6-No-2-1952.pdf