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(b Holywood, County Down, Ireland, Jan 26, 1922).

Australian painter, printmaker, book designer, lecturer, collector, gallery director and publisher of limited edition artists’ books, of Irish decent. He worked as a draughtsman before entering war service in the British Admiralty from 1940 to 1949, including five years in Colombo, where he made sketching trips to jungle temples with the Buddhist monk and artist Manjsiro Thero. Between 1949 and 1951 Adams worked as an exhibition designer in London and studied wood-engraving with Gertrude Hermes in her evening class at the Central School of Arts and Crafts (now Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design). In 1951, after moving to Melbourne, Adams began a 30-year teaching commitment at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), where he instructed many of the younger generation of Australian printmakers, including George Baldessin and Jan Senbergs. A brief return to Britain and Ireland in 1957–8 provided experience with Dolmen Press, Dublin, which published his first book of engravings, ...

(Vladimir Jossif)

(b Vienna, Oct 13, 1920).

Israeli painter of Austrian birth, active in Australia. He grew up in Warsaw. His father, the pseudonymous Jewish writer Melech Ravitch, owned books on German Expressionism, which were an early influence. Conscious of rising anti-Semitism in Poland, Ravitch visited Australia in 1934 and later arranged for his family to settle there. Bergner arrived in Melbourne in 1937. Poor, and with little English, his struggle to paint went hand-in-hand with a struggle to survive. In 1939 he attended the National Gallery of Victoria’s art school and came into contact with a group of young artists including Victor O’Connor (b 1918) and Noel Counihan, who were greatly influenced by Bergner’s haunting images of refugees, hard-pressed workers and the unemployed, for example The Pumpkin-eaters (c. 1940; Canberra, N.G.). Executed in an expressionist mode using a low-toned palette, they were among the first social realist pictures done in Australia.

In 1941...

Australian, 20th century, male.

Born 1940.

Painter, sculptor, illustrator.

Peter Booth passed from Abstract-Minimal painting to a violent Expressionism in 1977, at which time he realised his first Figurative painting. His works frequently depict human misfortunes and torments, in chaotic compositions tinged with religious sentiments....

Australian, 20th century, male.

Active also active in the USA.

Born 30 January 1885, in Kew (Melbourne); died 11 February 1969, in London.

Painter, draughtsman, stage set designer, engraver (etching, linocut), illustrator, writer, critic. Scenes with figures, portraits.

London Group.

Horace Brodzky was born in Australia but ultimately settled in Britain. In ...

New Zealander, 20th century, male.

Active in Europe from 1926 to 1939.

Born 3 December 1897, in Dunedin; died 1954.

Painter, engraver, illustrator.

London Group.

Buckland-Wright illustrated many works, including the Sonnets of J. Keats, The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe, Stendhal's ...

(b Melbourne, Oct 4, 1913; d Melbourne, July 5, 1986).

Australian painter, printmaker, draughtsman, sculptor, cartoonist and illustrator. Largely self-taught, he began printmaking in 1931 and worked as a caricaturist, cartoonist and illustrator for the weekly and left-wing press, his outlook influenced by experience on the dole and political struggle during the Depression. In 1941 he began oil painting, his first pictures being mainly a celebration of Australian working-class tenacity during the 1930s: for example At the Start of the March (1944; Sydney, A.G. NSW). A founder-member of the Contemporary Art Society in 1938, he initiated its 1942 anti-Fascist exhibition and helped organize an Artists’ Unity Congress, receiving awards for his paintings of miners in the ensuing Australia at War exhibition in 1945. From 1939 to 1940 he was in New Zealand and from 1949 to 1952 in Europe, mostly London. Later he made frequent trips to Britain and France, as well as visiting the USSR and Mexico.

Counihan’s imaginative and creative versatility enabled him to produce extended pictorial metaphors for inherent contemporary crises, embodying potent artistic responses to specific conditions of oppression and discrimination, the nuclear threat and attendant social alienation. From the late 1960s he created images in numerous interrelated series challenging Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, for example ...

(b Perth, July 6, 1915; d Perth, May 25, 2000).

Australian painter and book illustrator. Grand-daughter of a pioneer pastoralist of the Kimberley region in Western Australia, she first saw the Kimberley in her teens and was profoundly influenced by contact with the indigenous people. Working with her sister, Mary Durack (1913–94), she produced many illustrated children’s books that drew upon the lives and stories of indigenous children. The most popular children’s book was The Way of the Whirlwind (1941). Travel to Europe in 1936 and 1937 allowed her an opportunity to see great art collections and, during another visit in 1955, she studied briefly at the Chelsea Polytechnic in London. Durack’s first solo exhibition was in 1946, with an exhibition held in Perth of pictures of the north-west of Western Australia. Indigenous people of Western Australia were prominent subjects in this and many of her later exhibitions throughout the 1950s and 1960s. She spent much time in indigenous communities sketching Aborigines in remote camps or fringe settlements near towns....

Australian, 20th century, male.

Born 28 June 1894, in Narrandera (New South Wales); died 25 April 1971, in Sydney.

Painter, engraver, illustrator. Landscapes, flowers.

Adrian Feint studied under Julian Ashton and Elioth Gruner at Sydney School of Art. In 1916 he joined the Australian Imperial Force and was sent to the Western Front. He was granted three months leave in ...

(Stuart Leslie)

(b Warialda, NSW, Feb 6, 1915; d Sydney, Aug 17, 1989).

Australian illustrator, painter and writer. He studied under Dattilo Rubbo (1871–1955) in Sydney before travelling to London to work (1935–6) under Mark Gertler and Bernard Meninsky (1891–1950). Extensive travel through Africa on his return journey to Australia helped develop his love of the exotic and an interest in non-Western art. In the early 1940s he worked in close association with Russell Drysdale, making a reputation as a talented figure and landscape draughtsman and colourist. He enlisted in the Australian army in 1942 and in 1945 he was commissioned as an Official War Artist, working in New Guinea and Borneo in the last months of World War II. He published two illustrated wartime memoirs, Gunner’s Diary (Sydney, 1943) and Painter’s Journal (Sydney, 1946), which strengthened his reputation as a writer and illustrator of great wit and charm.

After a period working in the small country town of Hill End, Friend left Australia for more than 20 years, living and working first in Sri Lanka and then for an extended period in Bali. Within Australia his work was associated with the ...

(b Birmingham, March 15, 1863; d Waverley, Oct 1, 1930).

Australian painter, etcher and illustrator, also active in England. In his formative years he undertook illustrative commissions for the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, as well as for the Australian Town and Country Journal and other publications. For a time he painted with his friends Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder at their camps around Mosman, or on trips to Richmond and along the Hawkesbury River. In his best paintings of this period he achieved a lyricism and sure handling of paint that resembles the work of Conder. During this period he also became interested in etching. In 1900 he moved to New York and the following year he travelled to London, where he continued to work as a black-and-white artist with the London Graphic and Black and White. He painted landscapes depicting picturesque sights and developed an interest in monotypes, using the delicacy of this medium to create soft, low-key images of atmospheric subjects. He worked in the tradition of English landscape painters, such as John Constable and John Sell Cotman, producing calm, quiet, understated images....

Australian, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 1876, in Orange (New South Wales), in 1877 or 1878 according to other sources; died 1910, in Sydney.

Painter, watercolourist, illustrator, cartoonist. Figures, animals.

Henry Garlick studied under Arthur Collingridge at Orange Technical College in 1894. The following year he moved to Sydney where he worked as a solicitor's clerk and an illustrator while taking evening classes under Julian Ashton. His cartoons of animals were published in such journals as the ...

New Zealander, 20th century, male.

Active in the USA from 1927.

Born 1885, in New Zealand; died 1962.

Watercolourist, draughtsman, illustrator.

Harold Gaze studied in London. In 1927, he settled in Pasadena, California. His illustrations for children's books are characterised by their opalescent colours and his joyous sense of the grotesque. He often gave human form to rocks, waves or trees....

Australian, 20th century, male.

Born 30 May 1928, in Broken Hill (New South Wales); died 28 March 2006, in Broken Hill.

Painter, illustrator. Scenes with figures, landscapes, portraits, still-lifes.

Brushmen of the Bush.

Pro Hart grew up on a sheep farm near Broken Hill, then a thriving mining town. In his early twenties he worked in the mines and while he produced a great many sketches of local life and occasionally attended art class, he only began painting full-time at the age of thirty. He earned the nickname "Professor", later shortened to "Pro", due to his propensity for invention. In ...

Australian, 20th century, female.

Born 26 September 1909, in Newmarket, Melbourne; died 6 July 1999, in Adelaide.

Painter, printmaker, illustrator, designer. Landscapes, seascapes.

Elaine Alys Haxton studied at East Sydney Technical College from 1924 to 1928. While still a student, she worked as an advertising illustrator and designer. In 1932 she travelled to London where she contributed illustrations to ...

Australian, 20th century, male.

Born 1919, in Sydney; died 2002.

Painter, illustrator.

After training as an artist from 1937 to 1939, Frank Hodgkinson worked as an illustrator for newspapers in Sydney and Melbourne. After World War II he came to Europe and studied in England, France, Spain and Italy ...

New Zealander, 20th century, male.

Active in Britain from the late 1930s or early 1940s; also active in the USA.

Born 1916, in New Zealand; died 3 July 1994, in Devonshire, England.

Painter, illustrator, set designer, cartoonist, decorator. Landscapes with figures, seascapes, landscapes, murals.

Felix Kelly was born in New Zealand and came to Britain before World War II. He worked in advertising for a time, then took up painting seriously during the war. He also worked in the USA and became known as a painter of country houses in both countries. He painted in a Neo-Romantic style, depicting fantastic landscapes and buildings, both imagined ( ...

Australian, 20th century, male.

Born 22 February 1879, in Creswick (Victoria); died 21 November 1969, in Springwood (New South Wales).

Painter, watercolourist, engraver, illustrator, sculptor.

Norman Lindsay was the younger brother of Lionel Lindsay. In 1896 he moved to Melbourne where he covered his brother's illustration job at the ...

(Millichamp)

(b Malvern Wells, Worcs., 1868; d Hamilton, April 3, 1922).

New Zealand draughtsman, illustrator and teacher of English birth, best known for his Gallipoli sketches. In his formative years he painted portraits and allegorical works and around 1912 he moved to London, where he enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art. He subsequently joined Pearson’s Magazine as a staff artist.

When World War I broke out in 1914, Moore-Jones joined the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in Britain, giving his age as 32, serving in Egypt and Gallipoli with the 1st Field Company of New Zealand Engineers. He participated in the allied landing at Anzac Cove in April and was subsequently attached to Lieutenant-General Sir William Birdwood’s headquarters’ staff. He produced topographical pencil and watercolour sketches of the terrain under dangerous conditions, which provided the basis for planning operations in this area. Injured in 1915, he was invalided to Britain, where he made further watercolours based on his Gallipoli experiences. These watercolours are picturesque views, painted with a light, controlled touch, in the English tradition. They were shown in Britain, and later toured New Zealand where thousands attended the exhibitions and heard his talks about the Gallipoli campaign....

Australian, 20th century, male.

Active also active in England from 1953.

Born 1917, in Melbourne; died 1992, in London.

Painter, engraver, illustrator, designer, lithographer. Figure compositions, landscapes, landscapes with figures.

Sidney Nolan was a pupil at the National Gallery Art School, Melbourne, from 1934 to 1936, where he studied under Charles Wheeler. He continued his training in Paris, in 1937, at Hayter's Atelier 17. He did his military service between 1942 and 1945, and discovered the landscapes of southern Australia. He visited Europe between 1950 and 1951. After travelling around Greece, he moved to London in 1953....

(Ernest)

(b Richmond, Victoria, Dec 17, 1924; d Cottles Bridge, Victoria, Oct 14, 1990).

Australian painter and illustrator. He enlisted at the age of 18 and served with the Australian Imperial Forces during World War II. While hospitalized in New Guinea for several months, he turned to art as a means of expressing his concern for humanity. Returning home, he studied at the National Gallery Art School, Melbourne, under William Dargie (b 1912) from 1947 to 1950. In 1951 he moved to Cottles Bridge on the outskirts of Melbourne, built a house and studio in the bush and devoted himself to painting.

In 1954 Pugh travelled across the Nullarbor Plain. His experience of the vast uninhabited landscape altered his tonal approach to painting to an emotional expressionist style, which used sharp colour contrasts to convey his understanding of ‘the beauty and terror, the soft and hard qualities of nature’. His work received recognition in 1955 when exhibited in Group of Four at the Victorian Artists’ Society. In the following years, his concern for the preservation of the Australian landscape and its wildlife was reflected in bush landscapes studded with native animals and birds. These at times brutal images revealed his knowledge of the bush and the constant struggle for survival in nature....