William FRATER

Scottish 1890–1974
worked in Australia 1913–74

Although making a living for most of his life as a stained-glass artist, William Frater actively pursued a career as a painter and was instrumental in increasing the understanding of modern art in Melbourne during the interwar period.

Frater was born in Scotland and trained at Glasgow School of Art from 1905 to 1909 and again from 1912 to 1913, at a time when the Glasgow Colourism of J. D. Ferguson and S. J. Peploe was evolving under the influence of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Frater first visited Melbourne in 1910 and settled permanently, studying life drawing there in 1913, and established a reputation as a stained-glass designer. While taking life classes at the Victorian Artists’ Society, Frater met fellow Scot, Max Meldrum, and was initially influenced by his tonal theories, of which The artist’s wife, 1915, is a rare and significant example.

During the 1930s Frater developed a strong and sustained interest in the art of Paul Cézanne, which he espoused in his own portrait and landscape painting as well as in his lectures and writing on the subject of modern art. Together with Arnold Shore and George Bell, Frater taught at their school in Melbourne and influenced many artists of the period, promoting post-impressionism through his own use of exuberant brushwork and vibrant, sensuous colour, together with strong underlying structures:

My own approach to painting … always has been and I’m afraid until the end always will be … an impression from nature, what I would call perhaps co-ordinating and correlating my impressions from nature in terms of the medium I’m working in, paint … We must look to nature always, in the beginning, in the middle and in the end … In this country which has become my own country for this last fifty years or so, there is scarcely a part of this huge continent that doesn’t excite me … whether I have brushes or not I feel I want to paint the thing.1

1 William Frater, letter to Hazel de Berg, 1961, National Library of Australia.

Geoffrey Smith