Vera Merton Hamilton was born at Walhalla in Victoria, where her father was a mining engineer. She had four siblings, three sisters and a brother, but all remained childless. Vera Hamilton studied at the Melbourne Working Men’s College with the artist Leslie Wilkie (1879-1935) and apparently exhibited with the Victorian Artists Society (according to a Finney’s Art Gallery catalogue, Brisbane, 1949). She married photographer George Leichney on 18 August 1926 and came to Brisbane shortly after, as her husband was a photographer in the employ of the Sidney Riley Studio.(George Leichney frequently took photographs of his wife’s still life paintings, which she then retouched. Vera also hand-coloured George’s photographs.)
Although her paintings are usually undated, Vera Leichney began to exhibit at the annual exhibitions of the Royal Queensland Art Society from 1930 until 1951, but principally during the 1940s. Leichney served as a council member of the Society from 1944 to 1945 and from 1948 to 1950.
She managed Finney’s Art Gallery, Brisbane in the late 1940s and included her own work in a Christmas exhibition in 1948 as well as holding a solo exhibition of her works in October 1949. Leichney also became a member of the Brisbane Art Group and was included in the first and second exhibitions at Finney’s Art Gallery in 1948 and 1949 (These are the only surviving catalogues).
Landscapes in close proximity to Brisbane and floral still life paintings dominated her exhibited work and in the range of subjects and themes of her paintings she was typical of her time. She was accomplished colourist, as Bowl of narcissus (QAG Collection) well demonstrates. In the foreword to her exhibition at Finney’s Art Gallery, Eric Gibson-Wild, a fellow Society member, remarked on the quality of her representational painting, emphasizing the 'forthrightness’ of her work which is combined with 'the serenity of sympathetic understanding’ and 'quality and clarity of thought’. She died in Brisbane on 24 February 1951. Her widower George Leichney subsequently married another capable artist, Kathleen Coren (1903-83), on 4 April 1953.
Research Curator, Queensland Heritage, Queensland Art Gallery
- Writers:
- Cooke, Glenn R.
- Date written:
- 2005
- Last updated:
- 2011
