Antonio Salvatore Dattilo Rubbo (22 June 1870 - 1 June 1955) was an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

-born artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

 and art teacher active in Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

 from 1897.

Rubbo, or Dattilo-Rubbo, was born in Naples

Naples

Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...

 in 1870 and arrived in Australia in 1897. From 1898 Rubbo taught in Sydney

Sydney

Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...

 schools including St. Joseph's College, Hunters Hill

St. Joseph's College, Hunters Hill

St Joseph's College is a Roman Catholic, Secondary, day and boarding school for boys. It is located in Hunters Hill, a suburb on the Lower North Shore of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia....

, Kambala

Kambala

Kambaḷa is a traditional water buffalo race in muddy waters held from December until March. It is the native sport of Tulu Nadu region of South India.-Format :...

, The Scots College

The Scots College

For other schools with a similar name see Scots College.The Scots College is an independent Presbyterian day and boarding school for boys, located in Bellevue Hill, an eastern suburb of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia....

 and Newington College

Newington College

Newington College is an independent, Uniting Church, day and boarding school for boys, located in Stanmore, an inner-western suburb of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia....

. 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

Robert Hughes (critic)

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes, AO is an Australian-born art critic, writer and television documentary maker who has resided in New York since 1970.-Early life:...

 - but he was an inspiring art teacher, responsible for introducing a whole generation of Australian painters to modernism

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

 through his art school (opened in 1898) 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

Post-Impressionism

Post-Impressionism is the term coined by the British artist and art critic Roger Fry in 1910 to describe the development of French art since Manet. Fry used the term when he organized the 1910 exhibition Manet and Post-Impressionism...

 and cubism

Cubism

Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...

. 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

Roland Wakelin

Roland Shakespeare Wakelin was an Australian painter and teacher, born in Greytown, New Zealand, who with Roy de Maistre and Grace Cossington Smith are regarded as founding the modern movement in Sydney....

. Other students included Norah Simpson, Frank Hinder

Frank Hinder

Francis Henry Critchley Hinder was an award winning Australian painter, sculptor and art teacher who is also known for his camouflage designs in World War II.-Education:Frank Hinder was born in Sydney, New South Wales, in 1906...

, Grace Cossington Smith

Grace Cossington Smith

Grace Cossington Smith AO OBE was an Australian artist and pioneer of modernist painting in Australia and was instrumental in introducing Post-Impressionism to her home country...

 (whom Dattilo Rubbo referred to affectionately as 'Mrs Van Gogh'), Donald Friend

Donald Friend

Donald Stuart Leslie Friend was an Australian artist, writer and diarist.- Early life :Born in Sydney, precociously talented both as an artist and a writer, Friend grew up in the artistic circle of his bohemian mother...

 ("Aha Donaldo, always the barocco; rub it out, boy, rub it out!"), Roy De Maistre

Roy De Maistre

Roy de Maistre CBE was an Australian artist of international fame. He is famous in Australian art for his early experimentation in "colour-music", and is recognised as the first Australian artist to use pure abstractionism. His later works were painted in a figurative style generally influenced by...

, war artist

War artist

A war artist depicts some aspect of war through art; this might be a pictorial record or it might commemorate how "war shapes lives." War artists have explored a visual and sensory dimension of war which is often absent in written histories or other accounts of warfare.- Definition and context:A...

 Roy Hodgkinson, Archibald Prize

Archibald Prize

The Archibald Prize is regarded as the most important portraiture prize in Australia. It was first awarded in 1921 after a bequest from J. F. Archibald, the editor of The Bulletin who died in 1919...

 winner Arthur Murch

Arthur Murch

Arthur Murch Australian artist who won the Archibald Prize in 1949 with a portrait of Bonar Dunlop. He was interested in the French post-Impressionists, Cézanne and Seurat. His style later became more cubist. He was appointed as an official war artist for six months during the Second World War...

, social realist Roy Dalgarno

Roy Dalgarno

Roy Dalgarno is a social realist artist, born in Melbourne, Victoria in 1910, died February 2001 in Auckland, New Zealand.-Education and Training:* Secondary education at Ballarat Grammar School....

, Tom Bass

Tom Bass

Thomas Dwyer Bass AM, was a renowned Australian sculptor. Born in Lithgow, New South Wales on 6 June 1916, he studied at the Dattilo Rubbo Art School and the National Art School and established the Tom Bass Sculpture School in Sydney in 1974. In 1988 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia...

, and more.