painter, was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, on 26 May 1865, daughter of Maurice and Catherine Joel, a family comfortably off and sympathetic to the arts. Dunedin, too, provided a supportive environment with a solidly established educational infrastructure: primary, secondary and university education, as well as the art school established in 1870, were all open to female students. The Otago Art Society had grown from its modest beginnings in 1875 and a public art collection was established in 1884.
Joel began her art studies in her home town, then crossed to Melbourne and the National Gallery School (1888-89 and 1891-94) where she won first prize for painting from the nude in 1893. She returned to Dunedin in 1894, remaining there until 1899, then studied and painted in England, France (at the Académie Julian) and Holland from 1899 to 1905 and made a return visit to Australia and New Zealand from December 1905 to April 1907. Thereafter she lived in London, where she seems to have maintained closer links with Australian artists than with New Zealanders.
Joel exhibited frequently at the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français and with other organisations and galleries in England and Scotland, including the Society of Women Artists and the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists of which she was a member. Nevertheless, despite her assiduity and professional commitment, she never established a solid critical reputation within the more conservative wings of the British and French art world where she aspired to make her mark. The progressive, mildly avant-garde position she held within New Zealand painting in the 1890s was already outmoded in the world of Post-Impressionism, Cubism and the beginnings of Abstraction.
Portraits and the figure were major themes in her work from the beginnings of her exhibiting career, although in the 1880s and 1890s these were often overlaid by literary and narrative concerns. Her training in Melbourne introduced her to the nude. More substantial, however, is her extended exploration of the relationship between mother and child. Flower subjects and landscapes, and townscapes which some commentators saw as 'Whistlerian’, also appear throughout her career although of secondary interest.
Grace Joel died in London on 6 March 1924. Through a £500 bequest, she endowed a scholarship for painting from the nude at the National Gallery School, Melbourne.
- Writers:
- Collins, R. D. J.
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 2011
