One of his former classmates, Tom Roberts, returned from art training in Europe in 1885, and that summer they established the Box Hill artists' camp, where they were joined by Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder.

During this time, he began teaching at the National Gallery school, and later served as president of both the Victorian Artists' Society and the Australian Art Association.

Concerned with capturing the national life of Australia, McCubbin produced a number of large landscapes that reflect the melancholic themes then popular in literary accounts of European settlers' interactions with the bush.

During his first and only trip to Europe in 1907, McCubbin gained first-hand exposure to works by J. M. W. Turner and the French impressionists, accelerating a shift in his art towards freer, more abstracted brushwork and lighter colours.

"When he died", wrote Barry Pearce, "McCubbin was one of the very few Australian painters who found an exalted resolution of vision that progressed with age, so that some of his greatest paintings were made in the last ten years of his life.

In this position he taught a number of students who themselves became prominent Australian artists, including Charles Conder and Arthur Streeton.

[6] In 1901 McCubbin and his family moved to Mount Macedon, transporting a prefabricated English style home up onto the northern slopes of the mountain which they named Fontainebleau.

There he taught at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, where his students included painters Clarice Beckett, William Beckwith McInnes, Hugh Ramsay, Jessie Traill and Hilda Rix Nicholas,[7] and the photographer Ruth Hollick.

Widely considered to be amongst the finest paintings in Australian art history, Bush Idyll was on long term display in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra between 2017 and 2020 and between late 2021 and early 2022 it formed part of the key retrospective, 'Frederick McCubbin - Whisperings in wattle boughs" at the Geelong Gallery, Geelong.