sketcher, seemed to be the artist, (mis)catalogued as 'Lila Raidy 1880’, who was said to have signed a pencil, charcoal and ink panoramic view of Port Arthur, Tasmania, when the drawing was auctioned by Gowan’s of Hobart on 4 November 2000 (lot 209). Advertising in the Hobart Mercury of 24 January 1880, 'Miss Reidy’ offered to teach painting, wax flowers and fancy work in its various branches. However, when the drawing was re-offered by Masterpiece Gallery in September 2002 (cat. 8), Heather Curnow had identified it as one of a series of amateur drawings of the settlement, all done on the same paper c.1845 before the reclamation of the harbour (c.1849). Slightly different views are in the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, Tas., and Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW; a third, now lost, was photographed by Stephen Spurling c.1920 – photograph in National Library of Australia, Canberra, ACT – while a later, damaged version dated 1849 is in Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, Tas.
Lilla Reidy signed an unusual and competent Heidelberg School oil on canvas on board landscape (45 × 70 cm) with an Aboriginal woman in a long blanket cloak standing in front of a bark hut beside a giant hollow tree in the bush. The painting, acquired by James Fairfax from Thirty Victoria Street, was offered by Sotheby’s in the sale of the 'Fairfax Corporate Collection of Australian Paintings’ in Sydney on 17 November 2002 (lot 14: est. $4,000-6,000) when it was called Native Campsite , although Sotheby’s suggested it could be the painting titled Alone that Reidy had exhibited with the Victorian Artists’ Society in January 1900 (cat.58).
By then Lilla Reidy was living in Victoria. She exhibited regularly with the Victorian Artists’ Society from 1895 to 1910. In 1900 she showed Flowers – perhaps the undated oil (35 × 30 cm), done in early Roberts Heidelberg School illustrative style, of a young girl holding a posy of wildflowers offered at Sotheby’s on 17 November 1988 (lot 273, est. $6,000/8,000).
Lilla Reidy worked at Charterisville with Emanuel Phillips Fox and Tudor St George Tucker in the 1890s and Fox painted her portrait (see Zubans, cat.44, plate C14). In 1901 she was included in the Society of Artists’ Commonwealth Exhibition. At the First Australian Exhibition of Women’s Work, Melbourne 1907, Lilla Reidy showed two copper repoussé plates (not for sale) in section G, class 59, 'miscellaneous’, won by Elizabeth Ada Mackenzie of NSW with Mildred Creed second. She also showed After the Bath in the section devoted to genre painting, which William Moore (1907, p.849) noted 'was distinguished by fine painting of the central figure’.
Lilla Reidy applied her artistic skills to fundraising eforts on behalf of Australian servicemen during World War 1. An article from 1918 (http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article130035958) describes her designs on calico and watered silk, memorialising service personnel.
