TROY, MARY (1889-1973)

“Mixed Bunch” (c.1940)
Oil on board
38 x 46cm
Signed lower left
*private collection, Sydney
 
Troy is a forgotten Australian Modernist. She studied art at the Sorbonne, Paris, and in London where she exhibited five paintings of flowers or genre/figure scenes at the Royal Academy between 1937 and 1942. She also exhibited 48 times with Cooling and Sons Gallery, London. She taught art in NSW from about 1935 to 1953. She was a finalist in the 1951 NSW Jubilee Art competition, where her work "Caroline Chisholm Pioneering New Australians" was described as 'all theatre – a comedy in one act, and very charming at that’ ( Sun 16 July 1951). Her entry in the 1952 Wynne Prize, the 'dark and dramatic’ Winter Morning near Blackheath 'seems to derive more from the reds and dark swirling shadows of the Vlaminck in another part of the Gallery than from a winter morning near Blackheath’, the Bulletin commented (30 January 1952: article headed 'Archibald Prize’). The Goldfish 1957 (oil on hardboard 55.9 × 76.8 cm) is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW (see Art Gallery of New South Wales Acquisitions 1958, 15). Troy had her first solo show in Sydney in 1958, at David Jones Art Gallery.