Design and Art Australia Online

painter, cartoonist, decorative artist, art teacher and journalist, was born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, England on 14 May 1859. As 'A. Constance Jones’ she studied at the Derby branch of the South Kensington School of Art and in London at Heatherley’s and at the British Museum’s antique classes. She then managed a decorative arts firm in Glasgow and taught decorative art classes to working-class girls at the Glasgow School of Art. (She may also have held life classes.) In a review she wrote in Sydney ( Centennial Magazine 1/10, May 1889, p.742) ostensibly devoted to an imported exhibition of British paintings she argued the need for art classes for working girls in Sydney, commenting: 'When manager of the decorative section in connection with the Glasgow School of Art, I had … control of a large evening class of girls, from eleven to 18 or 20 years of age, drawn chiefly from the domestic servant and factory girl order’. They were, she said, easily worked up to second grade Freehand and Model Drawing South Kensington examination standard and then to doing original, if simple, decorative designs.

Constance Jones married Felix Roth in Sydney in 1881. Her uncle, Dr William Cutts, lived in Melbourne and the Roths arrived there in late 1884. They soon returned to Sydney. Having failed to find work as a decorative artist 'Madame Roth’ became instructress in life drawing for the Art Society of NSW’s women’s art classes under Julian Ashton in August 1885 – Sydney’s first life drawing classes for women (for which Ashton alone has been credited).

The Roths lived in Orwell Street, Darlinghurst, and Constance conducted a noted artistic salon in her extravagantly decorated “aesthetic” city studio in Elizabeth Street ( Tom Roberts and Charles Conder met there in 1888). She exhibited regularly, chiefly in her employer’s annual exhibitions. The Art Society’s 1885 show included her study, Sunflowers (unofficial emblem of the British Aesthetic Movement). The following year she showed two 'admirably painted panels for the side of a fireplace’, Dies and Nox .

She also exhibited with the Australian Artists’ Association in Melbourne, while in 1887 her Spring was among the NSW paintings sent to the Adelaide Jubilee International Exhibition, for sale at 14 guineas. She showed studies of Australian parrots, American toucan and other 'plumage birds’ at an Art Society conversazione that year and at the annual exhibition hers was 'the only decorative work worthy of note’, her Design for a Frieze being called by the Sydney Morning Herald art critic, 'one of the best things in watercolours [and] ... quite as good as the excellent “Australian Flowers” of Mr Henry’ [ Lucien Henry ]. 'In this class of decorative work Mme Roth has no rival here’, the Sydney Mail stated in 1888, when her Art Society’s exhibits included a door panel painted with cockatoos and parrots perched above prickly pears.

Roth drew illustrations for The Picturesque Atlas of Australasia , the Illustrated Sydney News and the Centennial Magazine , e.g. a little girl watering sunflowers initialled 'A.C.R.’ for a story, Pearl by Edith Lamb, Centennial Magazine 1/5 (December 1888), 325, illustrations signed 'A.C. Roth 1889’ for a poem, Baby Song by Henry Parkes, Centennial Magazine 1/7 (February 1889), 454-55, and three witty frog drawings for Alexander Lesley’s 'Frog – Myths’, Centennial Magazine 1/10 (May 1889), 770, 772 & 774 (and see JK Archive). In 1888 she won a prize of £1 for her Christmas cards entered in the Women’s Industries Exhibition.

She revisited Melbourne and travelled to Tasmania in 1888-89. At the 1889 Art Society exhibition in Sydney she showed five watercolours, four door panels 'consisting of peacock feathers relieved against a gold background’ (very Whistlerian) and four oil paintings, including A Mer-Child and a panel with a kookaburra on a blue-gum bough. Three works were sent on to the 1889 New Zealand and South Seas International Exhibition at Dunedin. Her many exhibits with the Art Society in 1890 included I’m a Gentleman from Japan (a girl looking up at a Japanese mask, the title from The Mikado already successfully mounted in Sydney) and a long narrow decorative panel Apples , which was purchased by the trustees for the National Art Gallery of NSW. One of her seven exhibits in 1891 was Last by Phillip’s Farm I Flow, To Join the Brimming River .

In her review of The Anglo-Australian Collection in the National Gallery of NSW organised by the Anglo-Australian Society ( Centennial Magazine 1/10, May 1889) Roth admired some paintings, including Frederic Leighton’s Phryne , G.P.J. Hood’s decorative procession The Triumph of Spring (purchased by the Art Gallery of NSW trustees for £750) and S. J. Solomon’s Remorse but she noted they were 'salted’ among dross: 'people at home still hold firmly to the theory that anything is good enough for the Colonies!’

In 1891 the then National Art Gallery of New South Wales held an acquisitive competition for watercolours illustrating 'picturesque New South Wales’. The eight prize-purchases included Roth’s Kelso Churchyard , acquired for the gratifyingly high sum of £75. The very large watercolour, dated 1891 and signed 'A. C. Roth’, was loaned Bathurst Technological Museum by 1906, and in the Bathurst Historical Society Museum in the 1980s.

Roth left Sydney in late August-early September 1892 accompanied by her lover Charles C. Penstone , a black-and-white artist who had drawn cartoons for Adelaide Punch (1878-84) and outback subjects for the opposition Frearson’s Weekly (Moore, SAA ii, 121-22). She took ’30 or 40 sketches of Australian subjects, chiefly birds and flowers’, with her, stating that she aimed to set up as a decorative artist in New York. This may have been deliberately misleading since she was soon in England. In 1894 her A Hunt for Breakfast on an Australian Lagoon was hung in the Royal Academy summer show. She moved to South Africa in 1895 as Mrs Penstone, marrying Charles (who founded the Cape School of Art) the following year after Felix Roth had divorced her.

Charles and Constance Penstone founded The Owl in 1895, a magazine originally published in Johannesburg but soon transferred to Cape Town because they feared that Kruger would not maintain freedom of the press after the Jameson Raid. The first Cape Town issue appeared on 6 June 1896 renamed The Owl: Penstone’s Weekly . Both drew cartoons for it and both used the initials 'C.P.’ (though Constance also used 'ACP’) and their work is not easily distinguished until Charles died in August 1896. [National Library of Australia, Canberra, doesn’t have issues of The Owl or of the Cape Times but a cartoon signed 'C. Penstone’ – probably Charles – is on p.99 of Gerald Shaw’s Some Beginnings: the Cape Times (1876-1910) , Lon & NY: OUP, 1975, reproduced from the Cape Times Weekly Edition , 3 June 1896.] Although the ownership and editorship of the weekly Owl changed regularly, Constance continued to manage it. She used her own name, her initials and the pseudonym 'Scalpel’ on the cartoons she contributed both to it and to the weekly edition of the Cape Times . The Owl , which ceased publication in 1908, employed a large number of cartoonists during the Boer War. The regulars were Constance Penstone, Heiner Egersdorfer , Boonzaier and Captain Mordaunt Cyril Richards ('M.C.R.’). Later, Roth contributed cartoons to The Cape and Cape Argus .

She also sent artworks back for sale in Sydney. At the Art Society’s 1897 exhibition she was 'well represented’ by a new craft – illuminated addresses. In 1902 she was a founding member of the South African Society of Artists. She married her third husband, the artist George Crosland Robinson, in South Africa. From about 1910 she concentrated more on watercolour landscapes than cartoons, according to Greenwall. However, Greenwall mentions that a woman known only as 'S.A.H.[sic] Robinson’ contributed Boer War illustrations to The Graphic and The Daily Graphic in 1900. Her original painting, The convent at Mafeking wrecked by Boer shells, was reproduced in The Graphic of 16 June 1900 and is now in the Mendelssohn Collection, Library of Parliament, Cape Town. There is some speculation she may also be 'A. Constance Smedley’, who signed work in the The King during the Boer War (although this is unlikely). She died at Glencairn, South Africa in 1928.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

1992