Australian History/Art
Book Details

Picturesque Pursuits

Colonial Women Artists and the Amateur Tradition

Caroline Jordan

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

Opinion

“A pride-of-place book on anyone’s shelf for its visual qualities, the story Caroline Jordan tells is nontheless its first treasure. With attentive historical and social research, the book defines and traces the origins of the ‘amateur tradition’ of women’s art within Australian colonial settlements.”
Elizabeth Lawson, Art Monthly Australia, #184 October 2005

"… a beautifully written and elegantly produced book which tells of a small number of educated women who struggled both to adapt their artistic taste and training to the natural environment of Australia and to find a balance between their duty to family and to their artistic ambition."
Alan Atkinson, Times Literary Supplement, Oct 7th 2005

About this Title

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.

About the Author

Caroline Jordan has taught art history at universities in Victoria and New South Wales and published widely in the area of Australian colonial and Modernist women artists. She is currently an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Australian Centre, where she is researching a social and pictorial history of the nineteenth-century art world in Australia.

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978-0-522-85097-0