painter, was born in Melbourne, daughter of John Catto Meston. She received most of her artistic training at Melbourne’s National Gallery School in 1882 and 1885-88, moving to Sydney in the early 1890s, where she exhibited with the Art Society of NSW. In 1897-98 she held art classes in her studio in Vickery’s Chambers, where in 1897 she had a portrait on view by Tom Roberts , apparently a good friend. She became well known in Sydney for her own oil portraits, her subjects including Colonel Goodlet, Rev. G. McInnes, Mr and Mrs A.B. Piddington, Sir George Reid (exhibited 1896), James Ashton MLC, Signor Hazon and Professor Sir Thomas Anderson Stuart (painted for Sydney University, where it remains). All her known surviving work is in oils.
The Sydney Morning Herald 's art critic sneered at the portrait Meston showed with the Art Society in 1894 and praised her still-life: 'With the wrathful ravings of the rejected ringing through the town, one wonders how Miss Emily Meston’s portrait … passed the selection committee, especially as this artist was already represented by flower-studies, for which she has a decided talent.’ At the inaugural Society of Artists’ exhibition in 1895, however, Meston’s portrait of Rev. G. McInnes, Moderator of the Presbyterian Church, was called 'the strongest portrait, so far as The Bulletin knows, yet painted in Australia by a woman’. Reviewing the exhibition in the Sydney monthly magazine Cosmos (Vol.2, no.1, 30 September 1895, p.79), 'an Amateur Critic’ – probably a woman (s/he especially praised the strength of the 'lady artists’) – noted that the trustees of the National Gallery [of NSW] had purchased Meston’s Study of Grapes from the show –
and very beautiful it is’; but the same lady’s portrait of the Rev. G. McInnes, the Moderator of the Presbyterian Assemby, astonishes all by its wonderful art. There is no mass of paint in the picture; you can see the canvas through the flesh tints, but the result is one to be proud of, and is a prophecy of great things in the future.
Still, clergymen were not normally hung in the National Art Gallery. In any case, the Bulletin 's review was published on 5 October and Cosmos on 30 September, both after the purchase had been made. Although the Bulletin critic also endorsed the trustees’ selection calling Study of Grapes 'exceptionally fine’, the Herald critic had now changed his mind. He thought this particular still life 'of inferior merit’ to either of her portraits (McInnes and Sasha ), both of which were noted as 'a great advance’ on her previous work.
In 1896 the Daily Telegraph commented that Meston had 'achieved a marked success’ with the two portraits shown that year and also praised her figure study of a young girl with 'floating flaxen hair’. The following year the Bulletin stated that one of her exhibits was 'the strongest portrait … yet painted in Australia by a woman’. When all unsold sketches and studies were auctioned by Lawson’s from the Society’s 1897 exhibition Meston’s Chrysanthemums (along with Roses by Ethel Stephens ) received the second top price of three guineas, slightly less than Julian Ashton 's Morning , which sold for three and a quarter guineas. Grapes was included in the ambitious Exhibition of Australian Art at London’s Grafton Gallery in 1898 and Meston was mentioned by name by R.A.M. Stevenson in the Pall Mall Gazette (4 April 1898) among the also-rans ('all the good things’). Her reputation-in this limited direction-was made. Although the portrait of a grey-headed man she showed in the 1898 Society of Artists’ annual exhibition was said to 'not quite maintain the high standard’ she had previously set, the Herald critic praised her two flower paintings ('seldom has finer flower painting been seen in Sydney’). She continued to show both portrait and still life paintings with the Society of Artists until 1907, when she showed a pastel of an Aboriginal girl and two oils of flowers.
Meston’s exhibits in the 1907 Women’s Work Exhibition at Melbourne, all shown competitively, included an Australian landscape Rain on the Coast (3 gns), a seascape After the Storm (5 gns), An Aboriginal Boy and two flower paintings: Study of Roses (20 gns) and Jonquils and Wallflowers (8 gns). In 1908 she showed mainly decorative flower and still life works in the Women Painters’ exhibition at Bradley’s Rooms, Sydney – an exhibition that led to the formation of the NSW Society of Women Painters, which elected Meston Hon. Treasurer. At its inaugural exhibition in 1910 she showed flower paintings priced at five and six guineas and a new study of grapes for which she was asking ten (the study of grapes donated to the Queensland Art Gallery in 1920 may be this work).
Her emphasis on modest still life rather than portraits (clearly for economic survival) led critics to complain that Meston failed to live up to her early promise. In 1908 D.H. Souter was complaining that her work in the women painters’ show at Bradley’s rooms was 'mainly inferior to that of previous years’. Today, we have little chance of knowing. Our public art collections hold only bunches of grapes. She was clearly more significant as a portrait than still-life painter in her lifetime, but 'national’ art galleries rarely acquired large oil portraits, especially if they were by women, preferring small still life studies that conformed to the 'decorative’ stereotype attached to women’s art and were considerably cheaper. Meston could get fifty guineas for a portrait but her average price for a still life was five, her top price twenty.
Emily Meston remained a prominent member of the Society of Women Painters until her death on 7 October 1914, when she was said to be aged 48. She was buried in the family plot in the Independent section of Rookwood Cemetery (section 4B, grave no.5604: Note the grave appears to be in Section 2B; however, cemetery records show it as 4B; Death Certificate No. 14297)
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 2011
