BELLETTE, JEAN (1908-1991)

“Resting Women” & “Self Portrait” (1947) (double-sided)
Mixed media on paper
30 x 40cm
Signed lower right
*private collection, Killara
 
Bellette was an influential Australian Modernist. Born in Tasmania, she was educated in Hobart and at Julian Ashton's art school in Sydney, where one of her teachers was Thea Proctor. In London she studied under painters Bernard Meninsky and Mark Gertler. A modernist painter, Bellette was influential in mid-twentieth century Sydney art circles. She frequently painted scenes influenced by the Greek tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles and the epics of Homer. The only woman to have won the Sulman Prize more than once, Bellette claimed the accolade in 1942 with For Whom the Bell Tolls, and in 1944 with Iphigenia in Tauris. She helped found the Blake Prize for Religious Art, and was its inaugural judge. Bellette married artist and critic Paul Haefliger in 1935. She joined the important Sydney Charm School (Merioola School) in Sydney with her husband, alongside contemporaries Russell Drysdale, William Dobell, Jeffrey Smart, Donald Friend, Jocelyn Rickards, Louden Sainthill to name a few. The couple moved to Majorca in 1957; although she visited and exhibited in Australia thereafter, she did not return there to live, and became peripheral to the Australian art scene. These amazing, original works were produced during her time with the Merioola School. In fact, this is the only Self Portrait I have been able to locate of Bellette, so it is very rare.