LOVETT, MILDRED (1880-1955)

"Seated Girl" (c.1920) 
pencil on paper
67.5 x 32cm
signed upper right
*private collection, Sydney
 
Mildred Esther Lovett is a forgotten, pioneering Australian Painter & Teacher. She studied at Mrs H. Barnard's Ladies School, Hobart, Tasmania from 1887-93, where her art teacher was William Henry Charpentier. She left school at 13 & became as a photographic retoucher at McGuffie's Alba Studio in Hobart (one of few stimulating jobs then available for school leavers). After that she five years at Hobart Technical College studying painting, modelling, life drawing & china painting under Ethel Nicholls & Benjamin Sheppard. In 1901, Lovett moved to Sydney to study under Julian Ashton at Sydney Art School, where she became his assistant teacher. In 1904 she returned to Hobart and began teaching in the Art Department of the Technical College, where she gained a full-time post with a salary of £50 a year, under the leadership of Lucien Dechaineux. By 1925 she had been appointed an art instructor there. Many of her students became noted artists, including Edith Holmes and Dorothy Stoner. Lovett was a key figure on the Hobart art scene and a council member of The Art Society of Tasmania. Highlights included representing Tasmania in the British Empire Exhibition in London in 1924 & joining the 1926–27 Group of Modern Painters founded by George Lambert, which exhibited in Sydney. In 1929 Lovell took leave from the Technical College to make a study tour of Europe, where she enrolled at the Westminster School of Art in London and at the Academie Lhote in Paris. Lovell was proficient in oil, water & pastel painting, sculpture & miniatures. What brought her the most critical acclaim was her china painting: The Lone Hand in 1913 put her "amongst the three or four great Australian painters on china". A vase she painted now resides in the Art Gallery of NSW, as one of Australia's key decorative works in the art nouveau style. Work of hers appears also in the National Gallery of Australia & the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. The University of Tasmania held a major retrospective of her work in 1989.