Antonio Dattilo Rubbo

Who was Antonio Dattilo Rubbo?

Antonio Salvatore Dattilo Rubbo was an Italian-born artist and art teacher active in Australia from 1897.

Rubbo, or Dattilo-Rubbo, was born in Naples in 1870 and arrived in Australia in 1897. From 1898 Rubbo taught in Sydney schools including St. Joseph's College, Hunters Hill, Kambala, The Scots College and Newington College. Dattilo Rubbo was not a great artist - "muddy genre portraits of very wrinkled old Tuscan peasants were his strong suit," according to critic Robert Hughes - but he was an inspiring art teacher, responsible for introducing a whole generation of Australian painters to modernism through his art school and his classes at the Royal Art Society of New South Wales. In contrast to nearly all other art teachers in Australia at the time, he was not a reactionary, and encouraged his students to experiment with styles as radically different from his own as post-impressionism and cubism. He was a flamboyant character who believed in championing his students to the hilt; indeed, in 1916 he challenged a committee member of the Royal Art Society to a duel because he had refused to hang a post-impressionist landscape by his pupil Roland Wakelin.