Iso Rae

Isobel Rae (18 August 1860 – 16 March 1940) was an Australian-born impressionist painter who lived and worked most of her life in Europe.

After training at Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria Art School, where she studied alongside Frederick McCubbin and Jane Sutherland, Rae travelled to France in 1887 with her family, and spent most of the rest of her life there. A longstanding member of the Étaples art colony, Rae lived in or near the village of Étaples from the 1890s until the 1930s. During that period, Rae exhibited her paintings at the Royal Society of British Artists, the Society of Oil Painters, and the Paris Salon. During World War I, she was a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment and worked throughout the war in Étaples Army Base Camp. She and Jessie Traill were the only Australian women to live and paint in France during the war, however they were not included in their country's first group of official war artists. Following Hitler's rise to power, Rae moved to south-eastern England, where she died in 1940.

Early life and training

Original copy of "The Buonarotti" Ladies Night guest entry card made out to Miss (Iso) Rae. Mason Firth & McCutcheon. Printers, Melbourne 1885. Private CollectionRae was born on 18 August 1860 in Melbourne, youngest daughter of Scottish emigrants Thomas Rae, a manufacturer and later a state politician, and his wife Janet Love. She was the granddaughter of the Reverend Andrew Love and Catherine Love of Geelong, Victoria, Australia. Rae studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School from 1877 to 1887, where fellow students included Rupert Bunny and John Longstaff. Her teachers included George Folingsby and Oswald Rose Campbell. Rae had some academic success in student exhibitions, receiving prizes and recognition from the judging panel on several occasions, alongside fellow students such as Longstaff, Frederick McCubbin, Jane Sutherland and May Vale. Rae joined, and exhibited with, the Victorian Academy of Arts between 1881 and 1883. Subsequently, she joined the Buonarotti Club's creative intellectual and social activities and plein air artist camps.

In 1887, Rae travelled to France and settled in Paris with her mother Janet and sister Alison. They lived there for three years, before the family moved to the artists' colony at the fishing village of Étaples, in northern coastal France. During this initial part of her career, Rae exhibited works in Australia and New Zealand, though she remained in Europe. Exhibitions in which she was hung included the 1889 New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition in Dunedin, and the 1896 Victorian Artists' Society, at which several of her landscapes were shown.

Career

Rae became a long-term resident at the Étaples colony. There she worked alongside a number of other Australian artists including Hilda Rix Nicholas, Rupert Bunny, Tudor St George Tucker, James Peter Quinn, Edward Officer, E. Phillips Fox and his wife Ethel Carrick, and others who took an interest in the Australians' work, such as Frenchman Jules Adler. In the late 1890s Rae exhibited regularly at the Royal Society of British Artists and the then Society of Oil Painters. Her works were sometimes of everyday scenes: she won third prize in her graduating year with a painting "of a Chinese hawker displaying his wares to two girls standing at a kitchen door", while two decades later exhibited in Australia a picture of a working-class girl carting water at dusk.

While living in Étaples, Rae exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon, with her success reported in the Australian press. She had works hung on many occasions, always in what was referred to as the New Salon, including 1908, 1909, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1913, and 1914. On some of the later occasions, her sister Alison's works were also included.

Rae's mother died in France during the war. The sisters remained there until the 1930s, when Hitler's rise to power prompted them to relocate to England,

Collections

National Gallery of Australia Art Gallery of New South Wales Australian War Memorial Musée du Touquet, Étaples