Dorothy Stephen (1891–1974) was an English-born Australian modernist artist active in Melbourne from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Dorothy Edna Hossack was born between January and March 1891 in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey. On 5 April 1916, in Chichester, she married Dr Clive Stephen, nephew of Chief Justice Sir John and Lady Madden. Dorothy served as a nurse at the Allied Base Hospital and was decorated with the British Red Cross & Order of St John in October 1917, while Clive was a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps at the 14th General Hospital at Wimereux near Boulogne.
After World War I the couple migrated to Australia, settling in Elmore, Central Victoria, where Clive practised medicine. Their son, Val Travers—later also a doctor—was born in 1918. The family left Elmore in early 1919, moving first to Prahran’s High Street and later to Malvern Road, Toorak.
Both Clive and likely Dorothy attended George Bell’s influential Saturday classes in Selborne Road between 1925 and 1930, exhibiting with other students of the Bell–Shore school. During this period, the Stephens conducted life-drawing classes that attracted artists including Will Dyson and others later associated with Melbourne’s modernist movement.
Dorothy exhibited regularly with the Victorian Artists Society (V.A.S.), though she encountered the era’s prevailing gender bias. At the 1950 V.A.S. spring exhibition, critic Alan Warren mentioned her and the other women exhibitors as merely “competent”. Her work was more distinctly recognised the following year when The Age critic noted that paintings by Dorothy Stephen and Alan Foulkes “command attention.” She attended the preview with Clive, Italian Consul Dr Lucia Dianelli, and NGV curator of prints Dr Ursula Hoff.
Critical response to her work continued through the 1950s. The Bulletin praised her 1953 painting Gannets for its refined observational qualities. Reviewing the Contemporary Art Society exhibition in October 1955, Arnold Shore described still lifes by Barbara Brash, Dorothy Stephen and Lesley Lawson as marked by restrained emphasis on shape and colour; in the same season, he judged her later V.A.S. Still Life “well-composed.”
Dorothy and Clive remained active into the 1960s. In the final Melbourne Contemporary Artists exhibition in 1965 they were shown alongside George Bell, Barbara Brash, Margaret Dredge, Inez Hutchison, Mary Macqueen, Anne Montgomery, Harry Rosengrave, and others, reflecting their sustained involvement in Melbourne’s modernist circles.
Dorothy Stephen, previously residing at Avoca Street, South Yarra, died on 10 January 1974 at Kahlyn Private Hospital, Bambra Rd., in Caulfield. Her work has recently been reassessed through the Sheila Foundation’s 'Into the Light’ project, which seeks to recover neglected professional women artists active from 1870 to 1960. Among its early acquisitions is a modernist, Modigliani-inspired portrait of a young man, Julian, by Dorothy Stephen.
- Writers:
-
James McArdle
- Date written:
- 2025
- Last updated:
- 2025
