EDWELL-BURKE, MARY (1894-1988)

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"Portrait Of A Lady" (c.1955)

oil on canvas

76 x 60cm

unsigned

*Lady & Leon Trout Collection, Chrisite's 1989

*Johanna Thannhauser Collection, Brisbane

Edwell-Burke (nee Edwards) was a notorious, pioneering, award-winning Australian Artist. She studied at East Sydney Tech in the 1920s & subsequently designed & painted fabrics & scarves. By 1927 she had occupied a studio in Paris, studied at Colarossi’s, been hung in the Salon and was called 'widely-travelled’. In 1929 she won 2nd prize in the State Theatre Art Quest, a national acquisitive competition for paintings to decorate Sydney’s grandest new cinema. The similarly pale & unworldly 'Heritage' was the first of a series of self-portraits, others being held at the QAGOMA & AGSA. She exhibited with the Royal Art Society in the 1920s & with the Australian Watercolour Institute in 1935-45. In the mid-1930s she showed with the Macquarie & Lodestar Galleries, & was a regular finalist in the Archibald Prize! For many years, Edwards has been remembered only for her adversarial role in the trial over William Dobell's 1943 Archibald Prize-winning portrait of Joshua Smith. The notoriety of the case overshadowed her art & may have been partly responsible for her decision to call herself by her parents’ surnames, Edwell Burke. In the face of death Edwell Burke apparently wished to repudiate all traces of her younger self as Edwards. She claimed she was not the artist of the acclaimed 'Heritage', the cover piece of the seminal Women's Art book HERitage (1995) by Joan Kerr.

This dynamic work was completed shortly after Edwards' infamous appearance at the landmark Dobell Archibald Prize case. It is likely that the sitter is "Mrs Raymond Arthur Gale (Myrtle Gale)". It originally was part of the famous Brisbane collection of Sir Leon & Lady Trout, two of Australia's greatest art patrons!!