Antonio Dattilo Rubbo

Antonio Salvatore Dattilo Rubbo (21 June 1870 – 1 June 1955) was an Italian-born artist and art teacher active in Australia from 1897. Although his own painting remained largely academic, his atelier and his classes at the Royal Art Society of New South Wales were unusually open to modern ideas, and it was his students who produced Australia's earliest modernist paintings.

Early life Rubbo, or Dattilo-Rubbo, was born in Italy in Naples in 1870, and spent his early childhood in the Neapolitan municipality of Frattamaggiore. A drawing prize won at the age of fourteen paid for study in Rome, where he qualified as a draughtsman in 1888. Four years of compulsory military service followed. He kept painting throughout, taking his fellow soldiers as portrait subjects, and used his leave to see Italy's great collections. He enrolled at Naples' Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1893. His teachers there included Domenico Morelli and Filippo Palizzi, and he left in 1896 with the academy's diploma, qualifying him to teach drawing in public institutions. One of his first friends in the colony was the artist Eirene Mort. He lodged with her family at Strathfield, where he taught an art class to cover his board while the Morts helped him learn English. He joined the Royal Art Society of NSW in 1900 and was a long-standing teacher in the School there from 1907 to 1934.

In 1903, he was naturalised and changed his surname to Dattillo-Rubbo. On 10 December 1904, at Paddington, he married Mildred Russell Jobson, who had studied under him. They had two sons; his eldest son, Sydney Dattilo Rubbo (1911–1969), was a professor of bacteriology at the University of Melbourne. As a result, Rubbo's classes became a hotbed for the emergence of Australia's first modernist paintings, most notably from Grace Cossington Smith (whom Dattilo Rubbo referred to affectionately as 'Mrs Van Gogh'), and Roy de Maistre and Roland Wakelin. His other students included Frank Hinder, Donald Friend ("Aha Donaldo, always the barocco; rub it out, boy, rub it out!"), war artist Roy Hodgkinson, Archibald Prize winner Arthur Murch, social realist Roy Dalgarno, Tom Bass,

In 1916, he relocated with his family to Manly and in 1919 was appointed to the War Memorials Advisory Board. In 1924, he moved his atelier to Bligh Street, much larger premises and founded the Atelier Club. In that same year, he joined the committee of the newly founded Manly Art Gallery and Historical Collection (now the Manly Art Gallery & Museum), making the gallery's first donation, his painting Aboriginal Head. The gallery now holds over one hundred and thirty of his works, with a room in the gallery named in his honour in 1940.

Painting The modernism Rubbo tolerated in the classroom left little mark on his own work. He was an eclectic who drew on the nineteenth-century popular styles of Impressionism, Realism and Naturalism. The critic Robert Hughes later observed that "muddy genre portraits of very wrinkled old Tuscan peasants were his strong suit". His late work retreated into academic convention, and the older Rubbo became, at times, an outspoken critic of the very movement he had once helped along. thumb Official Portrait of John Curtin by Antonio Dattilo Rubbo, 1947He founded the Dante Alighieri Art and Literary Society, and in 1954 became a life member of the Society of Artists.

Rubbo died on 1 June 1955 in his sleep at his Mosman home and was cremated. He had suffered from angina for many years. His self-portrait and portrait by Evelyn Chapman are held by the Art Gallery of New South Wales,