Design and Art Australia Online

painter and illustrator, came to Australia from England after World War I, having married an Australian, Captain W. Ian Macdonald, a nephew of Sir Rupert Clarke born at the Clarkes’ Melbourne mansion, Clivedon. Trained as an artist in London, Barbara began exhibiting shortly before the war and had two of her watercolours hung at the Royal Academy. During the war, she spent most of her time cooking in a soldiers’ hospital in London, her artistic activities being confined to making sketches in spare moments for her husband serving with the British Cavalry in France for the duration. Home commented that they 'adorned many a dug-out and mess-room’.

Her first publication in Australia was a children’s book, as was her second and apparently last; A New Book of Old Rhymes appeared in 1920 and Lee Ivatt’s Princess Herminie and the Tapestry Prince and Other Stories in 1922. Both were solely illustrated by Macdonald and published by Sydney Ure Smith’s Art in Australia Ltd. A New Book of Old Rhymes was published in a limited edition as twelve separate sheets printed on 'the best quality art paper’. Eleven of these illustrations were in a mannered, mock-antiquarian style; only one, Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary was in modern dress. Macdonald also wrote and illustrated a serial, 'The Epistles of Pamela’, published in Ure Smith’s Home in 1920-1921. A witty tale about Australian rural life as experienced by a sophisticated English newchum, this was a self-depreciating caricature of her own early married life in Australia. One episode (1 March 1921) included an apparent self-portrait, captioned ’106° in the shade. (The flies have already formed a halo in anticipation of my speedy departure to a better and a cooler world!)’.

Writers:

Callaway, Anita
Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

2012