Born in 1924 in Richmond, Victoria, Clifton Pugh made a name for himself for his portraiture and landscape paintings, after serving in the Australian Imperial Forces in New Guinea in his early years. Pugh attended the National Gallery of Victoria Art School from 1947 to 1949, and then spent much of his life in his bush property Dunmoochin outside of Melbourne. Greatly inspired by the natural environment, Pugh was joined in his love of the land by other artists, who together with him became the Dunmoochin Artists Society in 1953. In the year before his death in 1990, Pugh set up the Dunmoochin Foundation to preserve the bushland and enable other artists to use the studios in future.

Pugh exhibited notably with the Victorian Artists Society Gallery in Melbourne during its years of operation, and won the Archibald Prize in 1965, 1971 and 1972 for his portraits of R.A.G. Henderson, Sir John McEwan and Gough Whitlam respectively. At the 75th Anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli (1990), Pugh was named the Australian War Memorial's Official Artist.