watercolourist, printmaker, craftworker and one of the founders of Castlemaine Art Gallery, was born in Surbiton, Victoria. She studied painting at the Bendigo School of Mines with Arthur T. Woodward in the 1880s and, for a short period, at South Kensington during a visit to England in 1898-99. An enthusiastic collector of insects, she sent mounted specimens to the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, as well as to a London firm. After her marriage to [?] Newell in 1903, she continued to paint, despite six children and many household chores. Her daughter, Lucy Newell , wrote:
My mother used to say that she put the baby on her lap with a drawing board on top! That kept the baby down while she got on with her work, but I can’t say that I ever saw her do so. However, we certainly all had paint boxes and brushes at an early age, so perhaps it is not surprising that I always wanted to paint.
Several extant paintings are dated 1914-27, the period when the family was living at Kaweka, the property where Alice Newell started a Wild Flower Sanctuary in the 'Bush Paddock’ Alice Newell’s artistic career really began in about 1927, when her children had grown up. Then she studied linocutting and design with Frances Derham and did a lot of craftwork using her own designs of wildflowers for embroidery and French-polished woodwork. The NGA holds two of her watercolour and pencil design for painted decorations on wooden boxes and one of the boxes itself decorated with coloured inks (9.5 × 26.2 cm diameter, puchased 1980), all of about 1927. She also began painting seriously then. Her paintings range in size from miniatures on ivory (which she exhibited) to an enormous watercolour, Blue Gum and Bush Flowers (c.1953), still in family possession. Some late works were painted from memories of her Chewton days. She was well over eighty when she did her last embroidery and at least eight-five when she did her last painting. She died in 1966, not long after her ninetieth birthday.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1996
- Last updated:
- 2007
