Painter Alma Agnes Marion Figuerola, was the daughter of Alice Lucinda Walker Hanson (1880-1969) and Juan Pedro Narciso Figuerola (1869-1919). Her two sisters were also involved in the arts: Carmen Irene (1906-1993) as a writer of short stories and poetry and a dance teacher; and Sylvia (also Silvia) Lyla Alice (1911-1992) as a composer and cellist. Alma was first taught by her father Juan and then by Oscar Binder and Tom Carter before, in 1917, she started at the Max Meldrum art school, where Colin Colahan remembered that she was “very young and pretty as paint, and we all promptly fell in love with her (the normal atmosphere in Meldrum’s studio was almost Calvinistically austere)…” She left Meldrum’s in 1920, exhibiting for the first time in a group show that year. During the 1930s she lived at 51 Studley Park Road Kew, sometimes sharing with her mother or with sister Carmen and from the early 1940s until her death she lived at D’Estaville, 7 Barry Street, Kew.
Figuerola held solo shows in 1933 at the Meldrum Gallery in Elizabeth Street and in 1937 and 1945 at the Athenaeum Gallery at 188 Collins Street, and in 1951 at Georges Gallery in Collins Street. She frequently joined group exhibitions and painting camps, usually with artists of the Meldrum School, and as a member, from 1935, of the Twenty Melbourne Painters and its honorary secretary from c.1940. She also joined the Fellowship of Australian Artists.
In 1943 Figuerola entered her portrait of of Nina Murdoch in the costume of Pais da Vinho (Portugal) in the Archibald Prize Competition of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and again in 1953 with a portrait of Professor ES Hills. She conducted classes in tonalist painting in her studio and was an active participant in arts in her local area; in art exhibitions at the Hawthorn Municipal Library organised by Jessie Carbines in 1939 and 1940; as co-organiser of successive Kew Arts Festivals of 1939 and 1940; and as a foundation member of the Kew Historical Society from 1958 until her death on 8 December 1970. She predeceased her two sisters who both died in the 1990s.
The record price for an Alma Figuerola at auction is $US34,434 for a still life at Leonard Joel, Melbourne in 2017.
- Writers:
-
James McArdle
- Date written:
- 2023
- Last updated:
- 2024
