painter, was born in Sale, Cheshire, England, daughter of a Unitarian minister. After migrating to Auckland, New Zealand, where she studied at the Elam Art School (1924-29), the family settled in Sydney. Dorothy attended the National Art School at East Sydney Technical College under Frederick Britton and Douglas Dundas in 1929-32. Classical mythological subjects featured strongly in her work at this time; Diana Resting (1931) was only one of what may have been intended as a series of works on classical themes. Death of Eurydice (c.1931) and an untitled group of four female nudes from 1932 are held in a Sydney private collection. Her nude self-portrait entitled Study , evidently done at about this time, is inscribed from her studio, ’4 Dalley St. City’. Thornhill’s forceful and vigorous representations of women bear a striking similarity to those by the then popular European painter Tamara de Lempicka.
In 1933 Thornhill returned to England to study at the Royal Academy under Sir Walter Russell and F. Ernest Jackson, concurrently attending Roger Fry’s lectures at the Courtauld Institute. She returned to Sydney in 1934 and was appointed teacher of figure drawing at the National Art School, East Sydney Technical College, in 1937, a position she held for almost forty years. In 1941 she became the second wife of her former teacher, Douglas Dundas; they had a studio and flat at Edgecliff decorated in grey and lemon.
Thornhill had begun exhibiting with the Society of Artists in 1929 and was elected a member in 1942. As well as exhibiting frequently in group shows, she had two solo exhibitions at the Macquarie Galleries in 1940 and 1948 and a retrospective exhibition in 1977. At the last a former student, the painter Brian Dunlop, stated that her drawing, devoid as it was of formula and cliché, was among the finest ever produced in this country. Thornhill died in Sydney on 15 May 1987.
- Writers:
- Bruce, Candice
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 2011
