Norah Gurdon | A Spring Morning c1928 | SOLD
Norah Gurdon (1882-1974)
A Spring Morning c 1928
Oil on canvas on board
55 x 28 cm
Signed lower right
original frame: Whitelaw of Melbourne Label verso -including title
A beautiful example of Gurdon’s work En Plein Air
SOLD
Norah Gurdon (1882-1974)
BIO
Gurdon attended the National Gallery School from 1901 to 1908, being taught by noted artists Frederick McCubbin and Bernard Hall.[2] While there she studied with fellow artists Jessie Traill, Dora Wilson, Constance Jenkins, and Janet Cumbrae Stewart, who were to become her lifelong friends.[2][3] An accomplished landscape and still-life painter,[3] Gurdon exhibited her works with the Victorian Artists Society while still a student.[2] She established her artistic prowess early on by winning the major category for oil painting in the 1909 City of Prahran's Art Exhibition Prize.[2] By the following year she had rented a studio in Collins Street along with friends Stewart and Traill. As well as being a prominent figure in the Melbourne Society of Painters and Sculptors, Gurdon went on to exhibit with fellow National Gallery School alumni in 1913 as part of Twelve Melbourne Painters. The group included Ruth Sutherland, Charles Wheeler, Dora Wilson, May Roxburgh, Percy Leason, Louis McCubbin, Penleigh Boyd, H. B. Harrison, and Frank Cozier.[2]
Kalorama[edit]
Unlike many other female artists of the time, Norah Gurdon was unmarried and financially independent.[4] She purchased land in 1922 with plans to build her dream house in the Dandenong Ranges at Kalorama.[2] When the house was finished she lived there with her sister Winifred and had many fellow artists as guests, with former students and teachers joining her for plen air landscape painting.[2] While Gurdon painted in an impressionist style similar to her contemporaries, she favoured muted blue and grey tones to capture the hills of the Dandenongs.[3] She also enjoyed handicrafts, spending her spare time at tapestry looms designing and producing her own floor rugs and mats.[7] Wikipedia
BIO from ‘More Than Just Gumtrees’
By Juliet Peers
”Gurdon exhibited with the Victorian Artists Society, Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors, and the Australian Art Association. In the 1920s she held many solo exhibitions at the Athenaeum Gallery, and later at the Women's Industrial Arts Society in Sydney, and the Royal Queensland Art Society in Brisbane.She held an exhibition in 1937 at the Fine Arts Gallery in aid of the construction of St George's Hospital in Kew
Exhibited 1923-1954, remained a member of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors until 1974, artist, studied National Gallery School 1901-1908. One of the thoroughly professional generation of women artists, who emerged from the National Gallery School in the first decade of the twentieth century, Norah Gurdon belonged to a close professional and friendship network that these enterprising women artists, including Jessie TRAILL, Dora WILSON and Vida Lahey, formed. She spent the First World War nursing in France. Many of her paintings were executed at her home at Kalorama and portray the upper Yarra Valley and the vista from the upper reaches of the Dandenongs. Rather than the harsh "blue and gold" landscapes of 1920s pastoralism, she often favoured the blues and greys of distant hills and misty effects in the valleys. Many female artists and colleagues spent time staying in her home and painting in the district. Dorothy MOORE and Mabel PYE, were amongst the artists who worked at Norah's house.' Dora SERLE and her family also spent holidays at Kalorama with Norah.
As with Dora Wilson, Norah Gurdon could not be regarded as a technically innovative artist, but both artists maintained a consistent standard throughout a large oeuvre of work. During the 1920s, especially, she painted figurative studies and some fine genre and domestic scenes which rank amongst her most memorable pieces.
A number of her exhibitions were for fundraising purposes, including that of 1937 with proceeds to the Community of the Holy Name and St George's Hospital Building Fund, her 1943 exhibition for Red Cross Prisoner of War Fund, and her 1949 exhibition, jointly for Food For Britain and the Anglican Diosecan Homes for Elderly People.
Concise Exhibition History: VAS, YSS, Australian Academy of Art; Several solo exhibitions in Melbourne, including 1920 at
Represented: BendAG, CAG, ShepAG”
(More Than Just Gumtrees, Juliet Peers,p227)
