painter, illustrator, caricaturist and cartoonist, was born in Yackandandah (Vic.), daughter of Charles Edmonds who had trained in art at the South Kensington Schools, London and was her first teacher. The family moved to Brisbane in the mid-1880s, where her father became Secretary of the Art Society. Mabelle studied at Brisbane Technical College under a Mr Jackson for five years. She exhibited in the 1897 Queensland International Exhibition and with the Queensland Art Society in 1899 and 1901. After her father died Mabelle moved to Sydney and set up a studio in Royal Chambers, Castlereagh Street, where she also taught art. By 1903 she was illustrating for the Commonwealth Journal (her name misprinted as Mabelle Edwards) and for All About Australians (AAA). Later she drew for other journals as well. AAA ran a feature on her in its series 'Artists of Promise’ in 1904, when her studio-with a reproduction of Lord Leighton’s Flaming June in a prominent position-was in Royal Chambers, Hunter Street.
Edmonds painted and drew mild flattering caricatures of many theatrical subjects, e.g. Mr Albert Gran as Lord Jeffries in “Sweet Nell of Drury Lane” , drawn from the audience (ill. AAA). She also drew children. She became renowned for her black and white sketches of glamorous women, heavily influenced by Charles Dana Gibson’s 'Gibson Girls’, then almost as well-known in Australia as in the USA (e.g. 4 sets of Gibson’s postcards, printed in Melbourne, were offered for sale through New Idea in 1906). Edmond’s bejewelled young woman looking into a mirror observed by the devil illustrated a verse on the superior, lasting qualities of poetry over beauty in AAA 7 December 1904, 687. Many were reproduced as postcards in 1905-6, including Smoke Memories , six coloured cards of glamorous women smoking cigarettes with men appearing in the smoke. At least one of the set is in the SLV Australian artists postcard collection (PCV PCA 109), pictured on the library’s website.
Despite stating in 1904 that her ambition was 'to draw for ever and ever’, Mabelle Edmonds disappeared c.1908, marrying Pultney M. J. Murray in 1909. She died in Sydney in 1931, aged 51.
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1996
- Last updated:
- 2007
