Picturesque Pursuits: Colonial Women Artists and the Amateur Tradition

- Caroline Jordan,
(Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2005.)

Publication date: April 2005
Price: $49.95
Status: Available
Format: 232 + 16 pp, HB, 234x176mm, 16 pp colour plates, 29 b&w pics throughout
Subject: Australian History/Art
ISBN : 0-522-85097-9

Picturesque Pursuits explores the breadth and diversity of colonial women artists, including Mary Morton Allport, Annabella Boswell, Georgiana McCrae, Fanny Macleay, Louisa Anne Meredith and Harriet and Helena Scott Sketched on small pieces of card with embossed borders, painted on tiny squares of ivory or pressed between tissue paper in leather-bound albums, the artwork of nineteenth century women is easily overlooked, but no less beautiful and beguiling than work carried out on a larger scale.

As amateurs, women such as Mary Morton Allport, Annabella Boswell and Georgiana McCrae worked in sketchbooks rather than on canvas; in pencil and watercolour rather than in oils, and in miniature rather than full scale. They employed the genres deemed suitable for their gender: miniature portraits, flower paintings and picturesque landscapes. Some produced works on commission, but most worked from the privacy of their own home, painting intimate portraits of their loved ones and delicate sketches of the local flora and fauna, displayed only to family and friends.

Picturesque Pursuits explores the breadth and diversity of these women and their work, showing that Australia's heritage of talented women artists began long before the brilliant Modernist generation of the 1920s and '30s. Drawing on the artists' own words, as found in memoirs, journals and letters, and illustrated with many previously unseen works, Caroline Jordan places the achievements of this gifted but neglected group of women artists in a social and historical context for the first time.