MAX MELDRUM_1875 – 1955
Max Meldrum (1875-1955), artist and teacher, studied at the NGV School before beginning work as a freelance illustrator and cartoonist. He won the NGV Travelling Scholarship in 1900 and painted in Paris and Brittany for thirteen years before returning to Melbourne. In 1916 he founded an art school in the city, and many students from the NGV school left it to join Meldrum’s. They were the first of many generations of Australian artists known as ‘Meldrumites’, who were indoctrinated in what Meldrum believed to be the ‘invariable truths of depictive art’ and the ‘science of appearance’ relating to tonal and spatial relations between objects.
GRAEME INSON_1923 – 2000
Graeme Inson studied in Melbourne with Max Meldrum and became a leading exponent of Meldrum’s methods at his own school, established in Sydney in 1955. He held many solo exhibitions in Sydney into the 1990s. Inson was commissioned for many official portraits and was twice a finalist in the Doug Moran prize. He entered 41 works in the Archibald Prize between 1952 and 1979. The National Portrait Gallery acquired his 1980 portrait of Gough Whitlam in 2002, and his 1953 portrait of Brian Fitzpatrick in 2008.
