painter, was born in Ipswich, Queensland, one of six children in an established family of Scottish origin which made major contributions to medicine and to the pastoral industry in Queensland. Her early artistic training was in Brisbane under Godfrey Rivers at the Central Technical College, where she seems to have specialised in miniature painting. At Rivers’s urging, she successfully submitted a miniature of her father to the 1905 Royal Academy Exhibition.
In 1905, aged thirty-two, Bessie Gibson left Australia to further her artistic studies in Paris, having previously travelled to England and Europe with her family (1901-02). Her family always favoured her painting career and promised to support her for three years. Bessie settled in Paris, found herself a flat in Montparnasse, and did not return to Australia until 1947.
When she arrived at Paris she enrolled with three studios: Colarossi’s, Castelucho’s and that of the miniature painter Mlle Debillemont-Chardon. At Colarossi’s she was taught watercolour painting by Frances Hodgkins, the New Zealand expatriate painter. This was to remain her natural art form and the one in which she excelled. Pictures like Reflections (NGV) and Woman in a Mirror (QU & Manly AG) are proof that she could handle the medium as well as other painters of her day. They also show her predilection for prevailing academic compositions and styles. In this respect her art has close parallels to other painters then in Paris: Kate O’Connor, Maude Sherwood, Bessie Davidson and the American Charles Hawthorne.
At Castelucho’s Bessie Gibson studied oil painting and was indirectly but strongly affected by the art of James McNeill Whistler, an influence seen in her small oil on wood panels of Honfleur, Venice and Paris which adapt Whistler’s interest in leaving part of the panel exposed, his narrow range of tonal values, the grid system in which he composed his works and his rather detached approach to traditional subject matter. She was closely associated with a follower of Whistler, the American Edwin Scott, who also taught her and in whose studio she in turn probably taught. Although Scott’s work parallels hers, it can be even more closely related to another Brisbane painter in Paris, Anne Alison Greene, Bessie Gibson’s close friend.
Why Bessie Gibson chose to further her studies in miniature painting in Paris is curious; she had already gained distinction at the Royal Academy (1906, with a miniature of her father), and in 1907 she won first prize in this section at the Women’s Work Exhibition in Melbourne. She exhibited at the Royal Academy until 1923, at the Salon d’Automne (New Salon) between 1922 and 1934 and at the Salon des Artistes Français (Old Salon) between 1912 and 1939. Her submissions continued to be mainly portraits, one of which won an honourable mention at the Old Salon in 1926. She was included in the 1924 London exhibition, 'Australian Artists in Europe’, and showed her work with both the London Society of Women Artists (1924) and the Sydney Society of Women Painters (1926).
In 1939 she left Paris for England and remained there for the war’s duration when she seems to have stopped painting. In 1947 she returned to Brisbane. Although she exhibited her Parisian work regularly in Brisbane and had a solo show in Sydney in 1949, she was not really recognised in the southern states until International Women’s Year (1975) when her work was included in 'Australian Women Artists, 100 Years: 1840-1940’. Then people realised that her artistic qualities in watercolour and her small landscapes in oil compared favourably with those of other artists of her generation.
- Writers:
- Underhill, Nancy D. H.
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 1992
