FAIRLEY, LOUISE (1881-1954)

"Coastal Scene" (1935)
watercolour
28 x 35.5cm
signed lower left
*private collection, Sydney
 
Fairley is a forgotten Australian painter. She studied at the National Gallery School from 1915-17, under Lindsay Bernard Hall & Frederick McCubbin. She started in the Drawing School before upgrading to the Painting School by 1917. Her classmates included Clarice Beckett, Ethel Spowers, Adelaide Perry & Caroline Barker. In the 1920s like many women artists of the period who we excluded from exhibiting at major galleries, Fairley exhibited her works out of her cottage at 38 Heyington Place, Toorak. She worked in a range of mediums including oil, watercolour & pastel. She also produced pokerwork, and folk art on found items. She was a member of the Arts & Crafts Society, and exhibited regularly with the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors from the beginning of World War I, through to the 1940s, alongside contemporaries Dora Wilson, Nora Gurdon, Clarice Beckett, Ada May Plante, Jessie Traill, Aileen Dent, Isabel Tweedle, A.M.E. Bale, & Jessie MacIntosh. She was a member of the Victorian Artists' Society from the 1920s, exhibiting her watercolours alongside William McInnes, George Bell, Josephine Muntz Adams, Charles Wheeler, Violet McInnes, William Rowell, Eveline Syme, Murray Griffin, Ethel Spowers and many others. She also contributed works to the Frankston Gallery Exhibition in aid of the Australian Red Cross in 1944. Her works are incredibly rare, with few emerging on the secondary market.