Dunedin enjoyed a period of artistic efflorescence in the 1890s. The foundations for this had been laid by figures such as William Mathew Hodgkins, whose daughters Frances and Isabel came into their own as artists during this time. The colourful presence of the Italian painter Girolamo Nerli, who brought to Dunedin a form of impressionism, added a new sensibility to the city’s art scene.
Grace Joel was born into this milieu, the first daughter of a cultivated and well-connected Jewish family who believed strongly in the value of education, including education for young women. She attended Otago Girls’ High School and possibly trained at the Otago School of Art, and by 1886 was an elected member of the Otago Art Society. She left Dunedin for study at the National Gallery School in Melbourne in 1888-89 and returned there in 1891. Back in Dunedin by the end of 1894, Joel sought to establish herself as a professional artist.
Roses dates from this period. It was exhibited at the Otago Art Society’s annual exhibition in 1895 and singled out for praise by the Otago Daily Times’s reviewer. Declaring it ‘far superior to anything of the kind in the exhibition’ and noting the ‘great skill the delicate effects’ achieved, the critic reported on the ‘considerable improvement’ in Joel’s painting.(1) That improvement was doubtless stimulated by Nerli and the other artists alongside whom Joel worked in Dunedin, but the influence of her Melbourne teachers, among them Frederick McCubbin, a key figure of Australian impressionism, and Bernard Hall, a Munich-trained English painter with an abiding interest in tonality, is also evident.
While Roses shows Joel’s command of the still-life genre, it was her ability as a figure painter, especially of mothers and children - including Mother and child, c.1920 (Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa) - which established her reputation. Restless in pursuit of that reputation, she left New Zealand again in 1899, travelling to London and exhibiting in Europe with a measure of success. Apart from a brief return to Dunedin in 1906, she remained in Europe until her death.
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