McCubbin was born 25 February 1855, the son of a West Melbourne baker, and was educated at St. Paul’s Grammar School, Swanston Street, Melbourne. In 1872 he enrolled at the National Gallery of Victoria School of Design, working under Thomas Clark (1814-1883), fellow students included Tom Roberts (1856-1931) and Louis Abrahams (1852-1903). In 1885, along with Roberts and Abrahams, he established the first of the artists’ camps at Box Hill that would culminate in the movement now known as the Heidelberg School. In 1889 McCubbin contributed five paintings to the famous 9 x 5 Impression Exhibition, at Buxton’s Gallery in Swanston Street.

In 1895 McCubbin moved his wife and three children to Brighton, a seaside suburb close to Melbourne which had attracted a virtual colony of artists in the mid 1890s. The large scale Brighton Beach is one of McCubbin’s most impressive works from this period. The colours are shot through with a soft luminosity, pastel blues, pinks and greens dominate. The scene is intimate and poetically charged. The feathery foliage, bent tree trunks and limbs are highly evocative of the French painter Jean-Baptiste Corot (1796-1875); McCubbin had came very much under the influence of Corot’s lyricism, but, interestingly, his knowledge of the artist was second hand, having only middling quality reproductions to consult, and it was not until 1907, on his only trip to Europe, that he could study Corot’s work at first hand.