By the Window
Adelaide Perry
Details
- Artist
- Adelaide Perry
- Title
- By the Window
- Year
- 1924
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Size
- 61 x 51 cm
- Details
signed lower left: A E Perry 1924
label verso: 1531 (Paris Salon catalogue number)
inscribed verso: By the Window
Copyright courtesy the Estate of the Artist.
Exhibited
Paris Salon, Societé des Artistes Francais, Paris, 1924, No. 1531
Literature
Oliver, Jo, Adelaide Perry: Artist & Teacher, Arcadia, Melbourne, 2022, pp.59, 61, 65-66
Further Information
Adelaide Perry studied at the National Gallery school in Melbourne, where her teachers included Bernard Hall and Frederick McCubbin. Her award of the National Gallery of Victoria travelling scholarship in 1920 allowed her to study in Paris and London, where she developed from her rather academic style with exposure to modernist techniques.
In 1924, two works were exhibited at the Paris salon, including By the Window, “depicting a woman playing a lute beside a window, shows the development of Adelaide’s work from an academic rigidity to a more modern freedom. The composition is simplified and lines are more fluid, creating rhythms in the curving lines of the woman’s hair, neckline, curve of arm and shape of lute.” (Jo Oliver, 2022, p. 59)
Returning to Australia in 1925, Perry established herself in Sydney and was a member of the Society of Artists and founder of the Contemporary Group. In the early 1930s she established the Adelaide Perry Art School. She was acclaimed as a painter, as well as an accomplished printer, and teacher and was highly sought after for portrait commissions. An exhibition of the Society of Women Painters on her return in April 1926 included the painting By the Window which was praised in many contemporary reviews.
“Reports of the Society of Women Painters’ exhibition in April 1926 were positive, praising Adelaide’s still life and portraits. A review titled ‘Sydney Women Painters’ in the Australasian, a newspaper distributed nationally and abroad, described her work By the window as containing “delightful nuances of colour, a velvety softness of texture and pure, vivid outlines which give distinction to this work which was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1924. … Another review also praises Adelaide’s By the window describing it as a “portrait worthy of notice… which has some drawing and intention and a workmanlike simplification of values.” Yet another reviewer commented that the same painting has a “delightful harmony of colour with the background skilfully treated”. … Another still praised By the Window for showing “excellent composition”. …
In May 1926 newspapers reported:
More or less dominating the annual exhibition of the Society of Women Painters in Sydney is a Melbourne artist, Miss Adelaide Perry, who won a travelling scholarship at the National Art School, Melbourne, a few years ago and who went to Paris to study. Miss Perry is now installed in a little bit of Paris in a quaint little narrow Sydney street through which a bit of the gardens peeps through a tiny crevice. The presiding genius of this old-world studio garbed in a workmanlike overall of khaki drill has gone far since she gained her honours in Melbourne, and her art is as virile as it is versatile. In her present exhibition, she shows portraits, figure work, still life, and interiors and the most striking of all is an interior At the Window which was hung in the Paris Salon in 1924. If perchance this little gem should find a permanent home in one of our national galleries, the choice would reflect much credit on the selectors.”
(Jo Oliver, 2022, pp. 65-66)