Jessie Traill

Jessie Constance Alicia Traill (29 July 1881 – 15 May 1967) was an Australian printmaker. Trained by Frederick McCubbin at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, and by painter and printmaker Frank Brangwyn in London, Traill worked in England and France in the period immediately preceding World War I. During the war she served in hospitals with the Voluntary Aid Detachment.

Traill is best known for a series of prints created in the early 1930s depicting the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Critic and art historian Sasha Grishin describes her as "one of the great Australian artists of the 20th century".

Early life

Jessie Traill was born in Brighton, Victoria, on 29 July 1881. Her father was Scotland-born George Hamilton Traill, who had administered a vanilla plantation in the Seychelles, before becoming a bank manager in Victoria; her mother Jessie Neilley was Tasmanian.

Traill was one of four daughters of George and Jessie, all of them educated at a boarding school in Switzerland, where they learned French and German. The notebook details her active engagement in the print making process and the tuition of John Mather. Together with jottings of sales, news clippings and a congratulatory letter from John Mather, her early success with the medium is documented.

Jessie Traill also studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School from 1902 to 1906, where she was taught by a leading member of the Heidelberg School, Frederick McCubbin. George died while they were travelling in 1907, and is buried in Rome.

When war broke out in 1914 Traill, like fellow artist Iso Rae, joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment. then later in a military hospital in Rouen. Traill and Rae became the only Australian women artists to portray the war while in France. When in 1918 Australia first appointed official war artists, sixteen men were chosen; Traill was not included.

Describing the series as "perhaps the finest representations of this genre", National Gallery of Australia curator Roger Butler singled out her Building the Harbour Bridge VI: Nearly complete, June 1931 for comment, with its "towering, skeletal structure framed by foreground cranes". Sandy Kirby, writing for The National Women's Art Book in the mid-1990s, focussed on the earlier, fourth print in the series, Building the Harbour Bridge IV: The Ant's Progress, noting how it drew attention "to the technical feat of building, reflected as much in the viewpoint Traill selected as in the very medium of etching itself, with its linear emphasis echoing engineering drawing".

Reviewing an exhibition of Traill's works, art critic Christopher Allen, writing for The Australian in 2013, considered the images of Sydney Harbour Bridge to be "her greatest achievement".

Later career, 1932 to 1967 In 1935, Dora Wilson, artist and longstanding friend of Traill (they had studied together and shared a Melbourne studio), painted a portrait of Traill, which was acquired by the State Library of Victoria. Another portrait of Traill, by Janet Cumbrae Stewart, is held by the National Gallery of Victoria.

Legacy Butler collected works by Traill throughout his tenure at the National Gallery of Australia, which one reviewer considered was responsible for the "rediscovery of an artist previously almost unknown to the public". Author and art critic Sasha Grishin reviewed the exhibition for The Canberra Times, concluding that the show "reasserts the supremacy of Jessie Traill as one of the great Australian artists of the 20th century". Roger Butler observed of Traill's etchings that they were "the most poetic and technically refined prints produced in Australia before World War II".

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