Clara Southern

Clara Southern (3 October 1860 – 15 December 1940) was an Australian artist associated with the Heidelberg School, also known as Australian Impressionism. She was active between the years 1883 and her death in 1940. Physically, Southern was tall with reddish fair hair, and was nicknamed 'Panther' because of her lithe beauty.

Biography

Southern was born in Kyneton, Victoria, in 1860, She was the daughter of local timber merchant and farmer John Southern and farmer Jane Elliott. From 1883 to 1887, Southern studied at the School of Design, National Gallery of Victoria under Oswald Rose Campbell

Southern was a member of the Victorian Artists Society, the Australian Art Association, the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors, the Twenty Melbourne Painters, and the Lyceum Club.

Warrandyte By 1908 Southern had established an artistic community of younger landscape painters at Warrandyte, a township on the Yarra about 30 kilometres from Melbourne. The community included Penleigh Boyd and Harold Herbert. Her teacher and mentor Walter Withers often visited her in Warrandyte to paint the landscape.

On 9 November 1905, Southern married local miner John Arthur Flinn at St. John's Anglican Church in Blackburn. Together they built a cottage, and later a studio, at Blythe Bank, Warrandyte. Even after her marriage, Southern continued to exhibit under her own name.

An Old Bee Farm, held by the National Gallery of Victoria is one of her better known works. It was one of 56 paintings included in Lloyd O'Neil's Classic Australian Paintings, and was used as the cover illustration for Kay Schaffer's 1988 book Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition.

Clara was also supportive of charity and relief efforts, supporting Violet Teague and her sister Una in an exhibition for the Hermannsburg Mission Water Supply in Central Australia. Southern died in Melbourne on 15 December 1940.

Selected works

Exhibitions

1899–1917 - Victorian Artists' Society 1907 - First Australian Women's Work Exhibition 1914, 1917–1919 – Australian Art Association Exhibition 1934 - Exhibition in aid of the Hermannsburg Water Supply in Central Australia

Posthumous 1975 - Australian Women Artists, One Hundred Years 1840–1940, Melbourne University, Ewing and George Paton Gallery 1995 - A l'hombre des jeunes filles et des fleurs: In the shadow of young girls and flowers, Benalla Art Gallery 2011–2012 - Look, Look Again, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia National Gallery of Victoria Art Gallery of Ballarat Cruthers Collection of Women's Art Gippsland Art Gallery