Violet Bowring

Violet Bowring (née Nelson; 29 August 1890 – 21 January 1980) was a New Zealand artist who exhibited widely in both New Zealand and Australia. She was versatile in many media, including pastels, oils, watercolours and pencil, a successful miniaturist and from an early age made and exhibited jewellery.

She is best known for her portrait of her one-time neighbour Banjo Paterson, now hanging in Sydney’s Australian Club, and used as the cover illustration of a book The Best of Banjo Paterson, compiled by Walter Stone, published in 1977.

Career

The family moved to Wellington and Violet attended Pipitea Private School in Wellington and later the Technical College. She was successful in early competitions in freelance drawing and studied art under Maud Winifred Sherwood.

In 1915 and 1916 both she and the artist Walter Bowring (who she later married) contributed to the Countess of Liverpool's Gift Book, a collection of short stories, poems and essays on New Zealand's involvement in the First World War, including political cartoons and reproductions of work by New Zealand artists. In 1917, they also contributed to the NZ Freelance Christmas Annual, Described as "56 pages of lively, well-drawn cartoons, amusing stories and sparkling topical verse". They exhibited widely together at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, Wellington, in Wanganui, the Canterbury Society of Arts and later together in Sydney. Nelson left New Zealand in 1920 to further her art studies at the Chelsea Art School and London School of Art. It was the London of Virginia Woolf, she recalled as "mad, crazy, happy days". Violet Bowring joined the Society of Women Painters and the Women's Industrial Arts Society (a vice president in 1935) and was a regular exhibitor there and at the Royal Art Society. The couple became prominent in the Sydney art scene, exhibiting alongside the likes of Tom Roberts, Grace Cossington Smith and Thea Procter, Roland Wakelin,

It was a time when New Zealand-born women artists like Bowring, her former tutor Maud Sherwood and Adele Younghusband were gaining popularity and Bowring's portraits were well received. The press noted many of "the outstanding Australian artists turned out to be New Zealanders, New Zealand only recognising talent after being provided in another country." Her portrait of the daughter of the tobacco manufacturer, newspaper proprietor, parliamentarian and philanthropist, Hugh Denison (1865–1940) was the first four colour print reproduced on the cover of the Australian Women’s Day,1941. Unfortunately, a large fire in Townsville in 1960 destroyed much of her work and more were damaged during Cyclone Althea in 1971.