Design and Art Australia Online

painter, illustrator and author, was born on 28 April 1869 at Fitzroy, Melbourne, only daughter of Charles Muskett, a bookseller, and Phoebe, née Charlwood who carried on the business after her husband died in 1873. Alice’s brother Philip became a medical practitioner in Sydney; in 1885 Alice and her dying mother joined him there. Alice became the second pupil at Julian Ashton 's Sydney Art School while continuing to live with Philip until he died in 1909; she endowed her old art school with a prize for landscape painting in his memory in 1928.

From 1890 Muskett exhibited annually with the NSW Art Society. On 15 October 1894 she was elected to its council, but resigned in February 1895 in order to go to Paris and study at Colarossi’s (1895-98).

Indirectly a great compliment has been paid to Mr Julian Ashton, of the Julian Academy here, in the praise bestowed upon Miss Alice Muskett, now in Paris, where she has lately exhibited her first work at the Salon. In a long letter written to Miss Muskett by Ivan Dorsner, the custodian and instructor of the Colarossi classes, during the absence of the visiting professors, that painter speaks enthusiastically of the technique with which she began work in Paris. It is the style taught at the Munich Art Academy, and is followed by many famous artists whose names he quotes’ ( Sydney Morning Herald 25 July 1896, 7: info. Ingrid Anderson).

She had a painting hung in the 1895 Paris Salon and was included in the 'Australian Art in London’ exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in 1898; Study of Roses was purchased from it by the National Art Gallery of NSW. Later that year she returned to Sydney. Work had been shown with the Society of Artists in 1895-97, while she was away, including a small oil still life Violets and Old Letters in 1896 and The Red Ribbon , a 'remarkably strong’ pastel of a dark-haired young girl, in 1897. In 1898 the NAGNSW purchased her Ave Imperator! Morituri te Salutant from the Society of Artists’ exhibition for £42 – a flower painting of over-ripe yellow and crimson roses, plus 'scattered leaves and the suggestion of a skull grinning in the dark gloom of the background [which] give point to the ingenious application of the Latin text’, stated the SMH critic (27 August 1898, 7). The Day’s at the Dawn (72 gns) was included in the Commonwealth Exhibition of Australian Art in 1901.

According to Craig Judd, the first illustration by a woman published in the Bulletin was Alice Muskett’s picture of puritans illustrating her own poem, The Pillory 1905

Muskett continued to show regularly with the Society of Artists and her paintings were reproduced in its catalogues. In 1907 the Sydney Mail reported that, despite being 'quite young’, she was the only woman on its committee of management. The Mail 's art critic called her the 'first among lady exhibitors in the present art season’ – which included the First Australian Exhibition of Women’s Work in Melbourne, to which she contributed paintings including The Shrine ('exquisitely painted’, according to William Moore). At the 1909 Society of Artists’ exhibition, the Lone Hand reported that 'Miss Muskett’s triptych, “Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh,” is a harmonious decoration rich in color; as for her roses, she has always painted flowers most sympathetically’ ('The Art of the Year’, Lone Hand 1 April 1910, 665 [by various 'art correspondents’]).

As well as flowers, Muskett painted views, e.g. In Cumberland Street c.1902 (o/c, transferred from AGNSW to ML 1920), and produced stylish black and white illustrations for various Sydney journals. Her strong b/w illustration (not a cartoon) of figures in US Puritan dress, drawn to illustrate a very poor poem she wrote about a wicked woman 'who has slain Love’ entitled The Pillory , was published in the Bulletin on 6 July 1905. It appears to have been the first illustration by a woman ever to appear in that paper(information Craig Judd). She contributed illustrated articles to Lone Hand : 'White Witch’ 1 (July 1907), 264, 'Playing the game’ 2 (January 1908), 3 16-319, and 'Tapers’ 13 (June 1913), 130 (from index). She decorated other writers’ verses in Lone Hand too, including Hugh McCrae’s The New Year , 1 February 1908, 454. A romantic self-portrait accompanies her poem Aspiration in the Sydney Mail of 9 December 1908:

Once in the blue hour of dawn I saw glowing

The rose of the world that fulfils all desire…

Muskett’s commentary 'The Royal Academy through Australian Spectacles (being a letter by Alice Muskett to the Editors)’, published in the July-August 1910 issue of Art and Architecture when she was revisiting London, is very different in tone:

There are far too many pictures painted, it seems to me… it is a thousand pities this same energy and talent is not put into applied art of some kind… There are 777 oil paintings in the Academy this year… frankly bad as a whole.

Although mainly appalled by the number and quality of British works (and the painters’ 'self-complaisant lethargy’), she was also unimpressed by the Australian exhibitors, singling out Thea Proctor , Tom Roberts , John Longstaff , George Lambert and Arthur Streeton for some equally tart judgments ('Alfred East seems to be more like Streeton used to be, than Streeton himself does’.)

After painting in Egypt in 1911, Muskett returned to Sydney. There she shared a studio with Florence Rodway and became active in the Society of Women Painters. During World War I she worked in a soldiers’ canteen in London. Back at home after the war she lived in poverty (in rented rooms at Neutral Bay from the late 1920s). As 'Jane Laker’, her maternal grandmother’s name, she wrote a semi-autobiographical feminist novel set in Sydney in 1913, Among the Reeds (1933). In 1936 she suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and died on 17 July.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

1992