Bridget Elizabeth Whitelaw b. 4 November 1950

  • Curator
Bridget Whitelaw will long be remembered as one of the two curators who created Golden Summers, the first exhibition to define Australian Impressionism. Her career was cut short by a debilitating illness.
Tags: Prints and drawings, 19th century Australian art

Bridget Whitelaw was born in England, but spent her girlhood in Canberra and Melbourne. While she was a student at the University of Melbourne, where she studied Fine Arts, she lived at St Hilda’s College.
After graduation she worked for a while at the State Library of Victoria before joining the National Gallery of Victoria as Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings. Her thesis was on the collection of Lionel Lindsay prints and sketchbooks in the gallery’s collection.
The collection and its exhibition benefited from her scholarly rigour and insight.
In 1981 she travelled to Britain to work in the collection of the British Museum on a Harold Wright fellowship. On her return she met and married Dr Simon Oldfield, a love that lasted for the rest of her life. She was able to undertake that rare balance between a serious scholarly life in curatoria research and a close loving relationship with her children.
In 1983 Patrick McCaughey transferred to head the 19th century Australian drawings collection and in 1985, with Jane Clark, she co-curated the ground-breaking Golden Summers: Heidelberg and Beyond exhibition.
Her next major project was a re-assessment of the work of Frederick McCubbin, a project that more or less coincided with the pregnancy and birth of her youngest child. The exhibition opened in 1991. In 1992 after some time when symptoms were not understood, she was diagnosed with a rare muscle wasting disease. She resigned from the gallery, but managed to be the centre of her family’s life and lived long enough to see her children grow towards maturity.

Writers:

Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2013
Last updated:
2013