Design and Art Australia Online

painter, was born in Van Diemen’s Land on 14 August 1844, daughter of Frederick Le Geyt and Mary Ann Piguenit and youngest sister of William Charles Piguenit . Harriet, probably taught by her mother, first exhibited oil paintings of Tasmanian wildflowers as an amateur with the New South Wales Academy of Art in 1876. Her painting of a Tasmanian waratah, for sale at 5 guineas, was exhibited with the Victorian Academy of Arts in 1877. The following year she showed oil paintings of flowers at Sydney’s Metropolitan Intercolonial Exhibition, and twelve of her oil 'sketches from nature’ (on cardboard) of the indigenous flowers of Tasmania were exhibited in the Town Clerk’s Office at Launceston. The latter, displayed in a specially made painted sachet, were considered 'so true as to be startlingly realistic’.

Mrs McKenzie had a series of Miss Piguenit’s oil paintings of native flowers in the 1879 Fine Art Exhibition at Launceston, where Harriet herself exhibited a 'Table painted in Oils, Shells and Seaweed’. Mr Fleming lent more of her botanical paintings to the 1881 Hobart Town Hall art exhibition. Mainly oils, her flower paintings shown in the first exhibition of the Art Society of New South Wales held at the Garden Palace in December 1880 were said to display 'vigour of conception and grace of execution’. One was 'a particularly beautiful group of bush climbing plants, whose hues of vermilion, purple and chrome vie with those of the beautiful butterflies they have attracted’; another was 'a table top, on which is painted a wreath of Tasmanian wild flowers’. Her oil paintings in the following year’s exhibition included Tasmanian Robins and Arbutus and Camellias .

At the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition Piguenit’s work was included in both the New South Wales and Tasmanian courts, Harriet having settled in Sydney (at Warren Road, Marrickville) with her family in 1880. On 3 November 1881 she married Gerald H. Halligan. After her marriage she continued to exhibit with the Art Society of New South Wales, sending two flower pieces to its third exhibition in 1883 from her home, Eugowra, at Hunter’s Hill: a cluster of pelargoniums ('tastefully grouped and exquisitely coloured’) and the more ambitious but critically less well-received The Forest Beauties of New South Wales – Waratahs and Clematis ('the background is decidedly flat’). The latter was nevertheless included in the New South Wales court at the 1883 Calcutta International Exhibition. A watercolour, Pelargoniums , and an oil of wild violets were shown at John Sands’s (commercial) art gallery in January 1884.

The roses and pelargoniums Harriet Halligan showed later that year with the Art Society were considered among the best of all the flower paintings in the exhibition, her 'exquisite colouring’ and 'exquisite taste’ being, as usual, commended. In 1888 she won a silver medal for her flowers 'entered in the amateur artists watercolour section of the Women’s Industries Exhibition’, while in 1892 her 'group of Australian wild flowers in a bowl’ was purchased from the Art Society’s annual exhibition by Lord Jersey – 'the first Governor who has ever honoured the exhibition in the Art Society’s gallery in that way’. (His Excellency also purchased a group of yellow roses by Ethel A. Stephens .) Mrs Halligan won a medal at New York’s Columbian World’s Fair in 1892, while her wallpaper designs were exhibited with the Art Society of Tasmania in 1910. Taken to England by Mrs Henry Dobson, they won a medal at the National Council of Women’s London exhibition. The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery holds examples of her work.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011