ROXBURGH, RACHEL (1915-1991)

“Tower Of London” (c.1945)
Oil on composition board
44 x 53cm
Signed on verso
*exhibited at Macquarie Galleries, 1949
*private collection, Sydney
 
Rachel Mary Roxburgh was an Australian artist, educator, conservationist, and architectural heritage campaigner. Having studied art at East Sydney Technical College and the Adelaide Perry Art School, she exhibited with the Contemporary Group and the Society of Artists, and at the Macquarie Galleries, Sydney. In 1940, early in World War II, she organised a loan exhibition of works by Australian and international artists in aid of an ambulance fund organised by the Sydney Artists’ and Journalists’ Fund. She later served as a member of a Voluntary Aid Detachment before qualifying as a nurse at Sydney Hospital. After the war Roxburgh lived and worked in London for ten years. She studied drawing at the Central School of Art; travelled and sketched in France, Italy, and Spain; and painted in Cornwall. She sent pictures back to Australia in 1949 for an exhibition of Sydney artists working abroad and had a painting hung in the annual London Group exhibition for 1953. On her return to Australia in 1956 Roxburgh had a solo exhibition of paintings at the Bissietta Art Gallery, Sydney. She became a member of the newly formed Potters Society of New South Wales, exhibiting in its inaugural group show at the Macquarie Galleries in 1958. She sold pots through the fashionable interior decorating firm Marion Best Pty Ltd and later through the David Jones Art Gallery. For more than twenty years she taught art and pottery at a number of schools including East Sydney Technical College, Sydney Church of England Girls’ Grammar School, and the Abbotsleigh and Ravenswood schools for girls.