painter and printmaker, was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, on 22 December 1880, daughter of Alfred and Elizabeth Kimbell. She is just one of a number of promising artists from New Zealand who, after furthering their training in Europe, returned only as far as Australia, settled and established careers. Initially Maud Kimbell studied under the Scotsman James Nairn, a devotee of Impressionism, at Wellington Technical College, where she was also taught by Mabel Hill and Mary Elizabeth Tripe. After Nairn’s death in 1904, Maud took over his still life and sketching classes at the college for some nine years.
She left for Europe on a scholarship in 1911, a year after her first solo exhibition at Wellington’s McGregor Wright Gallery. After London, she headed for the Studio Colarossi where fellow New Zealander Frances Hodgkins was teaching watercolour painting, then moved to the studio of Tudor Hart. As a participant in Hart’s sketching group, she toured picturesque parts of England, France and Holland, developing a fluid and broad treatment of the figure and landscape.
Maud Kimbell left Europe for Australia in 1913 and established herself in Sydney, where she entered into a short-lived marriage (1917-20) with businessman Alfred Sherwood; they divorced in 1926. It is believed that she studied for a time with Julian Ashton at the Sydney Art School. In Australia she was especially appreciated for her watercolours and in 1924 was elected to the committee of the Watercolour Institute in Sydney, the only woman member of a group which included such luminaries of the Australian art establishment as Arthur Streeton , Sydney Long and Blamire Young .
She began exhibiting with the Society of Artists in 1914 ( Peasant Sewing was purchased from the exhibition by the AGNSW) and continued to show with them intermittently for years. From the 1942 exhibition the Art Gallery of NSW purchased another watercolour, At the Show . She also exhibited with the Society of Women Painters and was appointed to its Council. Her contact with New Zealand was not entirely broken and she held a comprehensive exhibition of her work in Wellington at the NZ Academy of Fine Arts in 1925. The most acclaimed of her Australian subjects shown was the watercolour, The Beach, Dee Why, Sydney (1923, MNZ), reproduced on the cover of the catalogue and featured in the mid-1925 issue of the National Art Association’s Bulletin .
The years 1926-33 were spent abroad with Gladys Owen – in Italy, France, Spain and North Africa. One of her charcoal drawings of an Italian village was hung at the Royal Academy in 1932, and she was represented at (among others) the Salon des Indépendents, Paris (1928) and the Prima Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Coloniale, Rome (1931). She held solo exhibitions in Sydney from the year she returned (1933, Macquarie Galleries) until the 1940s, expanding her repertoire to include colour linocuts such as Venetian Fishing Boats and Petunias , which bear comparison with the bold graphic designs of Thea Proctor and Margaret Preston . She continued to paint and travel with no decline in her abilities virtually until she died in 1956, at 'The Neuk’, Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. Late in life she travelled around Australia in a caravan.
- Writers:
- Kirker, Anne
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 2011
