In her method and choice of "everyday" subject matter, Beckett remained indebted to Meldrum, but her work also differed from that of other tonalists, in part due to its emotional and spiritual qualities, reflecting her interest in Buddhism, Theosophy and Freud.

In what has been called "one of the great disasters of Australian art history",[4] well over one thousand of Beckett's works were destroyed in the decades after her death, including many by her father that he deemed "unfinished"—works from her final years that were said by friends to be more abstracted and spiritual.

Their grandfather was John Brown, a Scottish master builder, who had designed and built Como House, and its gardens, in the Melbourne suburb of South Yarra.

In 1919, Beckett became the first National Gallery student to break from the school and study under rival teacher Max Meldrum, whose controversial theories became a pivotal factor in her own art practice.

Meldrum maintained that art "should be a pure science based on optical analysis; its sole purpose being to place on the canvas the first ordered tonal impressions that the eye received.

[17][18][19] Influential Melbourne modernist artist and teacher George Bell, founder of the Contemporary Art Society, described Australian Tonalism as a "cult which muffles everything in a pall of opaque density".

[21][22] With her parents' health failing, and after her sister's marriage in 1922, Beckett assumed household responsibilities that dictated the structure of the rest of her life, limiting her artistic endeavours.

In 1926, Beckett painted during a six-month sojourn in Victoria's Western District using as a studio the upper level of a shearing shed at the Naringal property of the brother of her good friend, Maud Rowe.

"[33] Reviewing one of her shows, an earlier critic from The Age wrote that "one would imagine from the little scenes that Miss Beckett has gathered, in the name of Australian art, that Australia was in a continual state of fog—all kinds of fogs—pink, blue, green and grey with an occasional mist that surely was never on land or sea.

"[34] In 1925, Herald reviewer and staunch anti-modernist James S. MacDonald[35] was especially derogatory, favouring, if anything, the flower studies that Beckett regarded as minor in comparison with her landscapes.

Despite a talent for portraiture and a keen public appreciation for her still lifes, the subject matter favoured by her teacher Meldrum, Beckett preferred the solo, outdoor process of painting landscapes.

Rosalind Hollinrake, who was largely responsible for Beckett's revival in 1970,[42][43] notes a use of colour to reinforce form, and more daring design, in the later years of the artist's short life.

Her review draws attention to Beckett's reductionism that "presage the work of Barnett Newman and [Jules] Olitski," of forty years later, and "solitude and stillness" as her leitmotif.

[46] However, even in 2001, Tim Bonyhady, discussing the "Modern Australian Women" exhibition in which Beckett was included at the Art Gallery of South Australia, acknowledges its director Ron Radford's observation that women artists Margaret Preston, Clarice Beckett, Grace Cossington Smith, Grace Crowley, Dorrit Black and Kathleen O'Connor were "more adventurous than their male counterparts in what and how they painted," but baulks at his notion that they were "the major Australian artists of the 1920s and 1930s.

The first museum exhibition of her work, "In a Certain Light" (a two-person show with photographer Olive Cotton) was curated by Felicity Fenner and artist Jenny Bell for UNSW's Ivan Dougherty Gallery in 1995.

Over 1999 and 2000, the retrospective exhibition "Politically incorrect: Clarice Beckett" was organised by the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, and Rosalind Hollinrake.

[63] Nobel laureate Patrick White referred to Beckett's work when discussing influences on his 1979 novel The Twyborn Affair, which has been described as vivid and painterly in its representation of landscape.