Gwendolyn Muriel Grant

Gwendolyn Muriel Grant was born in 1877 at Ipswich, Queensland, and after her mother’s death in 1879, she was raised by family relations Brisbane. She studied art at Brisbane Technical College under Godfrey Rivers and regularly exhibited with the Royal Queensland Art Society from 1899. Her first solo exhibition was held at the Kent Buildings, Brisbane in 1906.

In 1907 she moved to Melbourne and studied at the National Gallery school under Bernard Hall, Frederick McCubbin and Leslie Wilkie. Returning to Brisbane in 1912, she shared a studio with Vida Lahey. In 1915 she married fellow artist, William Gregory Grant who nicknamed her ‘Stan’. Remarkably, she was able to maintain her career as a professional artist whilst raising her two children (b.1917 and 1920), exhibiting regularly with the Victorian Artists Society and the Society of Women Painters, New South Wales; and holding fifteen solo exhibitions and four joint-exhibitions with her husband.

She regularly entered the Archibald prize and from 1920 her reputation as a portrait painter grew. She has been described as an ‘academic Impressionist’ and her painting shows an exploration of light and its effects, particularly painting en plein air in the landscape. Grant continued to teach art at the Brisbane Technical College until she was 75. Her work is represented in the Queensland Art Gallery and the University of Queensland.