http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/293756517

Picturesque pursuits colonial women artists & the amateur tradition

Sketched on small pieces of card with embossed borders, painted on tiny squares of ivory or pressed between tissue paper in leather-bound albums, the artwork of nineteenth century women is easily overlooked, but no less beautiful and beguiling than work carried out on a larger scale. As amateurs, women such as Mary Morton Allport, Annabella Boswell and Georgiana McCrae worked in sketchbooks rather than on canvas; in pencil and watercolour rather than in oils, and in miniature rather than full scale. They employed the genres deemed suitable for their gender: miniature portraits, flower paintings and picturesque landscapes. Some produced works on commission, but most worked from the privacy of their own home, painting intimate portraits of their loved ones and delicate sketches of the local flora and fauna, displayed only to family and friends. Picturesque Pursuits explores the breadth and diversity of these women and their work, showing that Australia's heritage of talented women artists began long before the brilliant Modernist generation of the 1920s and '30s.

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