flower and landscape painter, craftworker and singer, was a member of one of the founding families of Melbourne’s Jewish Community, eldest daughter of Alfred Levi and Rachel, née Benjamin. A resident of St Kilda for many years, Sara’s landscapes were often painted in Melbourne’s suburban parks and beaches. As well as Brighton Beach, favourite subjects were Fitzroy Gardens, Richmond Park (now a golf course and freeway) and the River Yarra.
As well as painting, Sara’s talents included copper work and singing. She studied at Melbourne’s National Gallery School from 1893-1898 and also with E. Phillips Fox; the figures in Fox’s Art Students (1895, Art Gallery of New South Wales) are Sara Levi, Violet Teague , Cristina Asquith Baker and Bertha Merfield, according to Ailsa O’Connor . Later Sara became a member of the National Gallery’s Past-Students’ Association, as well as of the Australian Institute of Arts and Literature (founded by E.A. Vidler), the Victorian Artists’ Society and the Women’s Art Club of Melbourne (later the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors).
Levi also exhibited with the Australian Natives’ Association ( see Dora Serle ) and was awarded a gold medal in one of their competitions. She showed paintings in the Women’s Work Exhibition at Melbourne in 1907, and with the Yarra Sculptors’ Society (from 1898), the Art Society of Tasmania, the Bendigo Art Society, and in Adelaide and Sydney. She exhibited her work from 1898 until the late 1930s.
Levi’s mature work was typical of Melbourne paintings made under the dual influence of the National Gallery of Victoria’s treasured Bent Tree by Corot and the tonal theories of the contemporary painter Max Meldrum. The former is evident in her atmospheric ti-trees and the like, the latter in her use of strong colour and vague form. Comparable visual artists include Clarice Beckett , A.D. Colquhoun – husband of Amalie – whose father Alexander Colquhoun, as critic of the Melbourne Herald , praised Levi’s work, Edward A. Vidler and, in monochrome, the Pictorialist photographers John Kauffmann and John Eaton. One critic observed that Levi was 'ambitious in colour contrast, but unobservant in form’; another praised the manner 'in which the tone relations are exceptionally just in their balance’.
The Art of Sara Levi written by Leon Caetoni and published by Edward A. Vidler (Vidler alone is credited) appeared in 1922 and was one of the first books devoted to the work of an Australian woman artist. Vidler (1863-1942), a driving force behind the Australian Institute of Arts and Literature, published two further monographs on women artists, An Australian Flower Painter, E.A. Oakley (1923) and Margaret Baskerville, Sculptor (1929), his interest in flower painting being linked to his profession as a curator at Maranoa Gardens in the Melbourne suburb of Balwyn. Few of his publications made money and his publishing business folded in 1930. Vidler considered Levi very successful in painting wattle, a painting of this subject being described in the Argus (3 September 1917) as 'a choice example – quite a poem – that has caught the grace and charm of our national flower’.
After living with relatives in Armadale for several years, Sara Levi died suddenly in a Malvern hospital on 16 October 1942. She was buried in St Kilda Cemetery. She bequeathed money for a scholarship, awarded to Miss Barbara Smith in 1947.
