Florence Fuller
Florence Ada Fuller was a South African-born Australian artist. Originally from Port Elizabeth, Fuller migrated as a child to Melbourne with her family. There she trained with her uncle Robert Hawker Dowling and teacher Jane Sutherland and took classes at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, becoming a professional artist in the late 1880s. In 1892 she left Australia, travelling first to South Africa, where she met and painted for Cecil Rhodes, and then on to Europe. She lived and studied there for the subsequent decade, except for a return to South Africa in 1899 to paint a portrait of Rhodes. Between 1895 and 1904 her works were exhibited at the Paris Salon and London's Royal Academy.
In 1904, Fuller returned to Australia, living in Perth. She became active in the Theosophical Society and painted some of her best-known work, including A Golden Hour, described by the National Gallery of Australia as a "masterpiece" when it acquired the work in 2013. Beginning in 1908, Fuller travelled extensively, living in India and England before ultimately settling in Sydney. There, she was the inaugural teacher of life drawing at the School of Fine and Applied Arts, established in 1920 by the New South Wales Society of Women Painters. She died in 1946.
Highly regarded during her active career as a portrait and landscape painter, by 1914 Fuller was represented in four public galleries—three in Australia and one in South Africa—a record for a woman who was an Australian painter at that time. In 1927 she began almost twenty years of institutionalization in a mental asylum, however, and her death went without notice. After her death, information about her was frequently omitted from reference books about Australian painters and knowledge of her work became obscure despite her paintings being held in public art collections including the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Australia's National Portrait Gallery.
Early life and career
Florence Fuller was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, in 1867, a daughter of Louisa and John Hobson Fuller. She had several siblings, including sisters Amy and Christie, both of whom subsequently became singers.The family migrated to Australia when Florence was one year old. She worked as a governess while undertaking studies in art, and first took classes at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in 1883, then again for a further term of study in 1888. During this period she was a student of Jane Sutherland, referred to in the Australian Dictionary of Biography as "the leading female artist in the group of Melbourne painters who broke with the nineteenth-century tradition of studio art by sketching and painting directly from nature".
Fuller's mother's brother-in-law was Robert Hawker Dowling, a painter of orientalist and Aboriginal subjects, as well as portraits and miniatures. British-born, he had grown up in Tasmania and made a living there as a portraitist, before returning to his native England at age thirty. For the next two decades, his works were frequently hung at the Royal Academy. He returned to Australia in 1885, and Fuller became his pupil. In that year, aged eighteen, Fuller received a commission from Anne Fraser Bon, philanthropist and supporter of Victoria's Aboriginal people. The commission was for Barak–last chief of the Yarra Yarra Tribe of Aborigines, a formal oil on canvas portrait of the Wurundjeri leader, William Barak. Ultimately, that painting was acquired by the State Library of Victoria. Although the painting is an important work regularly used to illustrate this significant figure in Australia's history, interpretations of Fuller's portrait are mixed:
one critic noted the painting's objectivity and avoidance of romanticising Aboriginal people, while another concluded that "Fuller is painting an ideal rather than a person".
In 1886, Dowling returned to his native England. Giving up her work as a governess, Fuller began to paint full-time, and had opened her own studio before she had turned twenty. Dowling had intended to return to Australia and had left behind an incomplete portrait of the Victorian governor's wife, Lady Loch. He died, however, not long after arriving in England; Fuller then completed Dowling's commission. Lady Loch became her patron. Other early portraits followed: two pictures of homeless children, entitled Weary and Desolate, in 1888; and Gently Reproachful circa 1889. Weary was acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2015. The gallery's curator of Australian art described the depiction of billboard posters in the painting as giving it a "sense of gritty realism that was arguably unprecedented in Australian art."
Also in 1889, Fuller was awarded a prize by the Victorian Artists Society for best portrait by an artist under twenty-five.
By August 1891 she had a studio in her home in Pine Grove, Malvern in Melbourne.
Europe and South Africa
In 1892, Fuller travelled to the Cape of Good Hope "to convalesce", although from what illness or injury, her biographer Joan Kerr does not say. While there, she was a guest of her uncle Sir Thomas Ekins Fuller, a member of the Parliament of the Cape of Good Hope, and through him she met Cecil Rhodes, the Colony's Prime Minister, who commissioned her to paint a landscape showing his home. Two years later, she travelled on to England and France, where she remained for a decade. In the 1890s, Australian artists studying abroad favoured Paris over London, and Fuller was no exception. Other Australians studying in France around that time included Agnes Goodsir, Margaret Preston, James Quinn, and Hugh Ramsay. Fuller studied first at the Académie Julian, where her teachers included William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and later, Raphaël Collin, for whom she was head of studio. Many of the French art schools had only recently opened their doors to women, and those at Académie Julian experienced poor, overcrowded conditions and contempt from the teachers. Despite this, Fuller's skills developed, and contemporary critics commented favourably on the influence of the French training.During her time in Europe, Fuller had great success. After a pastel portrait of hers was accepted for the Paris Salon in 1895, two of her paintings were shown there in 1896. That was followed by another, La Glaneuse, in 1897, in which year she also had a work accepted by the Royal Academy in London. She exhibited in many other locations: the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and Manchester Art Gallery in England, as well as the Victorian Artists Society and the New South Wales Society of Artists, and at the Melbourne studio of Jane Sutherland. There was even a painting, Landscape, hung in the exhibition for the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Bendigo. Not all her time was spent in Europe, however; in 1899 she returned to South Africa to paint Cecil Rhodes. One source suggests that she ultimately prepared five portraits of the founder of Rhodesia. A later newspaper report stated that Fuller also travelled and made sketches in Wales, Ireland, and Italy.
While in Europe, Fuller painted Inseparables, which portrays the figure of a girl sitting reading a book. It was acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia. When hanging the work as part of its exhibition The Edwardians, the National Gallery of Australia described the painting as one suggesting a love of reading. In contrast, art historian Catherine Speck regarded the work as "subversive" because of its portrayal of a young woman "gaining knowledge". In November 1902, the Australian Federal International Exhibition was held. It was opened by the Governor of Victoria Sir George Clarke, who spoke of its goal to advance "the industrial progress of Australia". The event occupied the entire Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne, and was dominated by an exhibition of art, both Australian and international. Included in this extensive survey of painting were six works by Fuller.
Perth
Further recognition came with the hanging of one of Fuller's paintings, Summer Breezes, at the Royal Academy in 1904. Other Australian artists whose works were hung at the same time included Rupert Bunny, E. Phillips Fox, Albert Fullwood, George Lambert, and Arthur Streeton. Fuller was the only woman painter to be represented. A critic writing in The West Australian observed:The work ... is essentially Australian in almost every detail. Standing in a sunlit Australian paddock, a lithesome Australian blonde holds her summer hat on against the rude caresses of an Australian breeze—a subject simple but grand in its simplicity ... Next to its suggestion of breezy sunshine and the incidental portrayal of willowy grace the picture is to be admired for its colour scheme ... The details of the picture disclose untiring care.
By the time Summer Breezes was on display, Fuller had returned to Australia, not to her previous home in Melbourne but to Perth in Western Australia, where she joined her sister, Amy Fuller, who was a singer. Although only in her mid-thirties, Fuller's background made her "one of the most experienced artists in Western Australia at this time". For the next four years, she painted portraits, including one of Western Australian politician James George Lee Steere, undertaken posthumously from photographs and recollections of those who had known him. It was acquired by the gallery whose board he chaired. She also took on students, including French-Australian artist Kathleen O'Connor.
Fuller's paintings from this period included A Golden Hour, described by the National Gallery of Australia as "a masterpiece ... giving us a gentle insight into the people, places and times that make up our history". The painting, an oil on canvas high and wide, portrays a woman and a man standing together in a rural setting in late afternoon, surrounded by grass, scattered gum trees, and Xanthorrhoea. When the painting was put up for sale in 2012, the auction house catalogue stated that it had been owned by William Ride, former director of the Western Australian Museum. It reported:
The current owners assert that Professor Ride always understood the figures in the picture were Sir John Winthrop Hackett, and his new wife, Deborah Vernon Hackett".
In addition to appearing as the small figure of a woman in A Golden Hour, Deborah Vernon Hackett was also the subject of a portrait, painted around 1908, again during Fuller's time in Perth. Anne Gray, the head of Australian art at the National Gallery of Australia, observed of Fuller's approach to the newspaperman's wife, that:
Fuller portrayed her sitter sympathetically, capturing the young woman's grace and charm. But she also conveyed the complexity of the young Mrs Hackett's character through her soft, feminine, pale-blue dress counterpoised by the dramatic black hat and direct gaze.
Fuller painted other works for the Hacketts. In a 1937 piece reflecting on early twentieth-century art in Western Australia, a reviewer recalled:
Dr. Hackett was a great patron of Miss Fuller, and he was a constant visitor to her dignified studio, above his office in the old West Australian Chambers. The first portrait I saw Miss Fuller working on was of Mrs. E. Chase ... The portrait was a commission from Dr. Hackett, and was destined to hang in his gallery. Miss Fuller painted Lady Hackett both before and after her marriage, and one particularly happy picture of her is as a young girl gathering wildflowers in the Darlington hills. Her portraits of the first Hackett babies were charming studies of childhood.