painter, printmaker and decorative artist, was born in Victoria on 6 June 1902, a grand-daughter of the soap manufacturer and keen amateur painter John Sutherland and a cousin once removed of Jane Sutherland . Her mother died before she was two and she was brought up by her father, George Sutherland, a real estate agent, and a housekeeper who lived with the family for many years. From 1918 Jean studied at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria [NGV] School, winning the NGV’s prestigious Travelling Scholarship in 1923. She travelled to Europe with her aunt Jean Goodlet Sutherland (c.1879-1968), a painter and sculptor who won second prize for sculpture at the 1907 Women’s Work Exhibition (after Margaret Baskerville ) and had given the younger Jean her first art lessons.
In London Jean Parker Sutherland enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools (RA), studying figure drawing and portraiture in oils. In September she travelled to Brittany, resuming her RA studies in 1926. She also took a correspondence course in black-and-white decorative art. She was keen on photography, decorative stencil work, ceramics, printmaking, languages, maths and geometry, all of which skills she improved in London. In spring 1926 her portrait of Miss Erskine (NGV) was hung at the RA. An extra year in London beyond her fellowship reputedly included a period at the Slade under Henry Tonks and some time in the studio of Beatrice Bland (1867-1911), a still-life painter who exhibited at the RA. Phipps mentions that she sent back reports of art seen in Paris in 1926 as a casual correspondent for Melbourne newspapers. One of her 'decorative paintings’ was included in the Rome Scholarship exhibition at the British School, Rome and she visited Italy later that year.
On returning to Victoria towards the end of 1927, Sutherland joined the Victorian Artists’ Society. She sent four paintings to the 1928 exhibition, but none sold and she never exhibited with the Society again. That year she became engaged to the painter Ernest Buckmaster, whom she had known since her student days, but it was broken off before he left for London in 1929 and she never married. She lived quietly on a small private income in the family home in Gardenvale (left to her when her father died in 1936). Many weekends were spent painting at her cottage at Kalorama in the Dandenongs, often with Enid Philip, runner-up for the 1923 scholarship, until about 1933 when the place burnt down. Ethel Carrick Fox stayed with Sutherland at Gardenvale in 1937 and encouraged her to take a renewed interest in the local art scene. She joined the Melbourne Society of Women Painters in 1940 and met Sybil Craig , who became her closest friend. She exhibited with the Women Painters until the early 1950s. In October 1944 she held her only solo exhibition, at Melbourne’s Sedon Galleries. Again few pictures sold.
Jean Sutherland died in Melbourne in July 1978. The National Gallery of Victoria holds five early oils and the National Gallery of Australia has many of her prints, but most of her work is held privately.
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 2011
