Design and Art Australia Online

cameo cutter, wax modeller and school teacher, came 'of an Irish family settled in Victoria’ and was reportedly self-taught as a carver and modeller (though she may have had lessons from sculptor Charles Summers in Melbourne). The 'Miss Kelly’ who exhibited wax flowers with the Victorian Fine Arts Society in 1853 was undoubtedly Elizabeth. At some time in the 1860s she may have run an Anglican girls’ school in Melbourne; 'Miss Kelly’s Institute’ at Park House, Brunswick, advertised classes in English, French, Italian, drawing in pencil and water colours and wax flowers for ’70 guineas per annum for pupils above twelve years, with Music, Gymnastics and Singing as chargeable extras’. Elizabeth A. Kelly’s only known surviving Australian work is a cameo of the Anglican bishop of Melbourne – evidence that the Anglican schoolteacher and the wax-modeller were one and the same.

In 1866, when Kelly exhibited two cameos at the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition, she was living in Nicholson Street, Carlton. By 1868 she was studying and working in London where her cameos astonished the public and attracted influential patrons, including Queen Victoria, according to the London Art Journal (reprinted in the Sydney Mail ). It is unlikely that she returned to Australia.

Although cameo cutting was a profession little in demand in colonial Australia, at least two women were cutting cameos in Melbourne in the mid-1860s – Elizabeth Kelly and Margaret Thomas, who was a student of Summers, which suggests Kelly may also have been a pupil. Both showed portrait cameos at the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition, and both left for England soon afterwards (following Summers). Thomas became a star pupil at the Royal Academy and went on to have a successful career as a (large-scale) sculptor and portrait painter. She may have continued to cut cameos; 'T. Thomas’ exhibited her 'Shell Cameo Portrait’ at Melbourne in 1869 (though this may have been an old work). By 1869 Miss Kelly was quite uninterested in exhibiting in Melbourne; she was already famous in London. Queen Victoria had been so impressed by her skill that she had purchased two of her Australian works, evidently the portraits of the Queen and Prince Albert with which Kelly had won a medal at the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition. Mr Gladstone gave her access to his collection of china and wood-carvings to copy and, more usefully, commissioned portrait cameos of himself and his family. The Duchess of Argyll was another enthusiastic patron.

The London Art Journal gave Kelly’s work a rave review (reprinted in Sydney) and promulgated a splendidly romantic story about her 'early education in art in the “bush” of Australia’ (i.e. the densely-populated suburb of Carlton, Melbourne) where, without knowledge or mentor, 'guided by what is erroneously called chance’, she was drawn to:

first carving heads on pieces of Australian lava, and thence proceeding to the shell, sometimes copying from such engravings or models as came in her way, far from any “school”, and occasionally designing as well as carving.

From this bucolic existence, Kelly proceeded straight to London and found fame. Irish-Australians like the Kellys have always been good at pulling English legs.

The best known example of her work is Portrait Medallion of Bishop Charles Perry n.d. (c.1865), shell 5.5 × 4.4 cm (oval); inscr. verso 'E.A. Kelly Sculptor Melbourne’ (DL). It has long lain neglected (and broken into two pieces) in the Dixson Library and was obviously done before she left for England, almost certainly at about the time of the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition. The subject, Charles Perry (1807-1891), was Anglican bishop of Melbourne from 1848 until 1874, when he sailed for England with his wife, Frances (Fanny), officially resigning in 1876.

It is an exquisitely detailed, extremely naturalistic profile portrait, apparently most lifelike when compared with the Wiegall lithograph (La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne), if rather more flattering. From this example alone one may cheerfully concur with the Art Journal :

The examples submitted to us are such as could not fail to excite admiration; they are portraits chiefly, excellent as likenesses, and cut with marvellous neatness-graceful, yet forcible. It is not too much to say that nothing so good, in this class of art, has been heretofore produced in England.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

2011