Charles Meere, Australia, ustralian beach pattern
02 Marine Paintings, With Footnotes, #258
1 min readMar 20, 2020
Australian beach pattern, c. 1940
Oil on canvas
91.5 x 122.0 cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Charles Meere was one of a group of Sydney artists whose work modernised classical artistic traditions as a means of depicting national life during the inter-war period. The epitome of his vision is Australian beach pattern, a tableau of beach goers whose athletic perfection takes on monumental, heroic proportions. Meere created a crowded and complex composition through the pattern of figures, which appears as a still-life of suspended strength. This iconic painting encapsulates the myth of the healthy young nation symbolised by the tanned, god-like bodies of the sunbathers…