PARSONS, ALICE MARY (1866-1939)

“Nouveau Screen” (c.1920)
mixed media & pokerwork (pyrography)
152 x 106cm
Signed
*private collection, Sydney
 
Parsons is a forgotten South African-born Australian Artist, Illustrator and Woodworker. She was born in Port Elizabeth in South Africa and migrated as a child to Melbourne with her family. There she and her younger sister, Florence, trained with their uncle Robert Hawker Dowling and teacher Jane Sutherland and took classes at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, becoming a professional artist in the late 1880s. While her sister, Florence Ada Fuller, returned to South Africa and then trained in Paris, exhibiting at the Royal Academy, Alice moved to Sydney and married Alderman, Frederick William Parsons, and set up a girls day school "Wooroonook" at her residence in Strathfield. She continued to paint and exhibit professionally, illustrating several books and was appointed President of the NSW Society of Women Artists aka Society of Women Painters, by her sister-in-law, A. Hedley Parsons (a prominent painter in her own right). Alice's sister, Florence, went on to become one of the leading and influential female Australian Impressionists, although she remained close with Alice. She even appointed Florence as the Society's inaugural life drawing teacher. 

This screen is exceptional for the complexity of its two pokerwork panels, and for its landscape - rather than floral - subject matter. The technique of pokerwork involves the creation of pictorial or decorative effects on wood using a heated tool to create linear or shaded areas. Also known as 'pyrography', it was particularly popular as a craft practised by women in the early 20th century, a result of the return to handicrafts as promoted by the Arts and Crafts movement. Parsons exhibited pokerwork with the Society of Arts and Crafts of New South Wales of which she was a member from 1916 to the early 1930s. Her skills as an artist and the range of tonalities she uses that distinguish the screen as a particularly fine example of the art of pokerwork. Another fine example is in the permanent collection of the Powerhouse Museum! Though undated the screen can be approximately dated to 1920 on the basis of the art nouveau style treatment of the landscape, with its sinuous tree forms & exaggerated topographical features. Fashionable before the war, art nouveau lingered on as a stylistic influence in Australia into the early 1920s. The screen complements many other examples of decorative arts produced by women in the museum's collection and significantly extends our understanding of the nature and extent of early 20th century Australian decorative arts and design.