Ada May Plante was born on 4 October 1875, at Temuka, New Zealand, daughter of Isabella, (née Guthrie)and Thomas Crowther Plante, merchant who had emigrated from England. The family moved to Australia in 1888, and by 1890 were living in East Melbourne. Ada matriculated from Presbyterian Ladies’ College in 1891, next year taking the exhibition in history and English. She trained at the National Gallery School under Lindsay Bernard Hall and Frederick McCubbin, winning prizes for drawing in 1894, 1895 and 1896, and first place for still-life painting in 1898. She was known by fellow students as 'Venus’ for her red hair. Her contemporaries were George Bell, Margaret Preston, Hugh Ramsay and Max Meldrum, and her close associates were Isabel Hunter, Mary Nanson and Christina Asquith Baker.
She first exhibited with the Victorian Artists’ Society in 1901. The following year she spent time to London and also in Paris, where she shared a studio with Christina Baker while studying at the Académie Julian from October 1902 to February 1904 and on return she showed her French paintings in the Victorian Artists’ Society 1905 winter exhibition and continued to exhibit with them until 1916. In the First Australian Exhibition of Women’s Work, Melbourne, 1907, Plante won prizes for portrait and figure painting. She was a member of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors.
In the 1920s she lived in a house at East Melbourne which she and her sister Mary Agnes rented to tenants including Adrian Lawlor, a champion of modernism and a lifelong friend and admirer of her art. In the mid-1920s she met William Frater, who introduced her to the paintings of Cézanne, Van Gogh and Post-Impressionism and painted with her in the city studio she shared with Isabel Tweddle and Mary Meyer. In the 1920s she painted little, but in 1932 she was one of the founding exhibitors of the pioneering Post-Impressionist Melbourne Contemporary Group, whose members included Bell, Arnold Shore, Frater, Tweddle and Lawlor.
Perfectionist, shy and intensely private, Plante lived very quietly on a small inherited income and throughout her life she lived in houses that she shared with other artists, which exposed her to diverse ideas. In 1935 Plante moved to Darebin Bridge House, Ivanhoe, where other artists, Ambrose Hallen and Lina Bryans, later came to live and where Frater often painted. She exhibited with the Contemporary Art Society in 1941 and 1943, and heldd her only solo exhibition at George’s Gallery in 1945. In 1947 she moved to Research to live with Christina Baker. She died on 3 July 1950 at Armadale and was cremated.
Despite attracting attention as a student and young artist, her work remained relatively unknown. Her early style was Whistlerian Impressionism, but in the last twenty years of her life she mastered Post-Impressionism with the encouragement of fellow artists Frater, Shore, and Bryans with whom she lived in “The Pink Hotel” at Darebin, and the critic Basil Burdett. Following her death in Melbourne on 3 July 1950, a memorial exhibition was held at the Stanley Coe Gallery, Melbourne, in 1951. She is represented in the major Australian galleries.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 2023
