User:Jamesmcardle/sandbox
Mary Fisher Meyer (née Nanson) (1878-1975) was an Australian painter
Early Life and Education
[edit]Meyer was born in 1878 in Melbourne, the second daughter, after Margaret Isabel, of Elizabeth (née McMichael), first wife of Edward Nanson, and older sister of Eleanor Lucy, Katherine St Clair, Francis Wiliam and Judith.[1] In the year of Mary’s birth her father had emigrated to Australia with his family to take up a position as Professor of Mathematics at the University of Melbourne.
From 1896 to 1900 Mary studied with E. Phillips Fox and Tudor St George Tucker at their Melbourne School of Art. Mary attended the summer school at Charterisville that Fox and Tucker Fox and Tudor St George Tucker had established in the old mansion above the Yarra River in East Ivanhoe, the lease of which they had taken over from Walter Withers in 1893. It was Australia's first recognised summer school of art. The women, including Ina Gregory, Mary Meyer and Helen Peters were accommodated in rooms of the stone house and a chaperon and housekeeper looked after them and Violet Teague may have been their tutor.[2]
Mary's beauty inspired E P Fox, whose patron was her future husband, Felix Meyer, to paint a portrait of her at age twenty (though Germain has it that the subject is her sister),[3] in the course of which he made a finished charcoal drawing[4]. His Whistleresque[5] Portrait of Mary, Daughter of Professor Nanson was exhibited in 1898 at an exhibition of Australian Art in London, at the Grafton Gallery,[6] and is now held in the National Gallery of Victoria.[7] Mary herself traveled in about 1902 to study at the Westminster School of Art and later travelled and painted throughout Europe. Her mother died not long after her return, in 1904, when Mary was 26.
Artist
[edit]On 20 January 1904 Nanson, then resident at the George Hotel in St Kilda, married, in the registry office because of their differing faiths, the Jewish obstetrician and gynecologist Professor Felix Meyer, born 19 June 1858, the son of son of Monk Meyer and Rebecca (née Fink).[8][9][10][11] The couple had no children, were avid supporters of the arts, and traveled together through through England, Scotland, and Europe in 1927. Juliet Peers proposes that the marriage caused a rift with Mary's family, and that her 'Art collecting and the production of a prolific oeuvre of small plein-air works (and copies after the admired Arthur Streeton) possibly compensated her for a degree of social ostracism. Her marriage to a Jewish man some years her senior having caused some consternation...Jewishness could still have a certain social stigma at the time of her inter-faith marriage, a generation before Jewish radicals became to a great degree the conscience and leaders of Melbourne cultural life.'[12]
Throughout the 1920s-1930s, though perhaps as early as 1912, Mary shared a studio with Ada Plante and Isabel Tweddle in Collins Street, Melbourne where Felix also had his private practice in obstetrics and gynaecology. Being close to Lina Bryans' mother Mary developed a life-long friendship with Lina.[6] Mary also associated with Tom Roberts and especially Rupert Bunny, who also made a portrait of her, in 1911.[3][13]
In 1936 Mary's father died at 86, followed in 31 August 1937 by her husband who died in Armadale aged 79 only two years after his retirement.
Style
[edit]Meyer painted prolifically, specialising in small, Impressionist landscapes influenced by her time at Charterisville, seldom exhibiting because, given her wealth, she had no need to work professionally, though dismissed or overlooked because of that;[14] she was satisfied to exercise her creativity. Her technique was impressionistic, using rapid strokes with a round brush as did the French Impressionists, and bold colours evident in her early self-portrait.[15] For landscapes she tended to use the blue and green hues favoured amongst the Charterisville students.
Death and legacy
[edit]On 11 March 1975 Mary Meyer died in Melbourne at the age of 97 and is interred at Springvale.[16] Ten years earlier Melbourne’s Lyceum Club, of which she had been a founding member and member of its Art Circle,[17] held a retrospective of her work when she was in her late eighties. Peers records that 'Mary was rather rather prickly towards some classical modernists at the Lyceum Club in the early 1960s who assumed she was an 'amateur' painter.'[12]
A substantial part of her nearly $874,000 estate was endowed to the University of Melbourne for its medical library and $130,000 to the University of Melbourne for postgraduate scholarships in literature and in obstetrics and gynecology in her husband’s name. Works from her collection, which included paintings by Bunny, Streeton, Fox, Heyson, Roberts and others,[3] were donated to the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria and many of her own paintings were offered to a succession of Victorian regional galleries in 1976.
Exhibitions
[edit]Posthumous
[edit]- 1978, 6 –22 October: survey show of work by Mildred Lovett, oils by Mary Meyer. Important Women Artists, East Malvern[18]
- 2013, July-October: Australian Impressionists in France, National Gallery of Victoria, Federation Square[19]
Collections
[edit]- Australian National Gallery[4]
- National Gallery of Victoria[7]
- Bendigo Art Gallery
- Castlemaine Art Museum
References
[edit]- ^ "Death Notices". The Age. 1 October 1969. p. 31.
- ^ Topliss, Helen; Monash University. Department of Visual Arts. Exhibition Gallery (1984), The artists' camps : plein air painting in Melbourne 1885-1898, Monash University Gallery, p. 108, ISBN 978-0-86746-326-2
- ^ a b c Germaine, Max (1984). Artists and galleries of Australia and New Zealand. Sydney: Lansdowne Editions. p. 638. ISBN 978-0-86832-019-9.
- ^ a b Fox, Emmanuel Phillips (1890s). "not titled [Portrait of Mary Nanson]". Australian National Gallery. Retrieved 5 December 2024.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ Smith, Bernard; Bradley, Anthony, M.A.; Smith, Terry (1980). Australian art and architecture essays presented to Bernard Smith. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. pp. 144, 146. ISBN 978-0-19-550588-7.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ a b Forwood, Gillian; Bryans, Lina, 1909-2000, (artist.) (2003), Lina Bryans : rare modern, 1909-2000, The Miegunyah Press, p. 27, ISBN 978-0-522-85037-6
{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ a b Fox, Emmanuel Phillips (1898). "Portrait of Mary, daughter of Professor Nanson". National Gallery of Victoria. Retrieved 5 December 2024.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ "Family Notices". The Argus (Melbourne). No. 17, 963. Victoria, Australia. 9 February 1904. p. 1. Retrieved 5 December 2024 – via National Library of Australia.
- ^ "Fact and Rumour". Punch. Victoria, Australia. 21 January 1904. p. 20. Retrieved 5 December 2024 – via National Library of Australia.
- ^ Gray, Anne (2002). Australian art in the National Gallery of Australia. National Gallery of Australia. p. 98. ISBN 978-0-642-54142-0.
- ^ Forster, Frank M. C. (1986). "Meyer, Felix Henry (1858–1937)". In Nairn, Bede; Serle, Geoffrey (eds.). Australian Dictionary of Biography. Vol. 10. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. ISBN 9780522843279.
- ^ a b Kerr, Joan; Holder, Jo (1999). Past present the national women's art anthology. Sydney, Australia: Craftsman House. pp. 30–31. ISBN 978-90-5704-141-9.
- ^ Bunny, Rupert (1911). "Portrait of Mary Meyer, oil on canvas". Australian National Gallery. Retrieved 6 December 2024.
- ^ Hammond, Victoria; Peers, Juliette (1992). Completing the picture : women artists and the Heidelberg era (Third ed.). Melbourne: Artmoves. pp. 9, 54, 83. ISBN 978-0-646-07493-1.
- ^ Meyer, Mary (1898). "Self-Portrait (oil on board, 29 h x 18 w cm)". Australian National Gallery. Retrieved 5 December 2024.
- ^ "Mary Fisher Meyer". Find-a-Grave. Retrieved 6 December 2024.
- ^ Gillison, Joan (1975). A history of the Lyceum Club Melbourne (paperback ed.). Melbourne, Victoria: Lyceum Club. ISBN 978-0-9597181-0-2.
- ^ "Weekender: What's On". The Age. 6 October 1978. p. 13.
- ^ Taylor, Elena (2013-01-01), Australian impressionists in France, National Gallery of Victoria, retrieved 5 December 2024