Painter and drawer. Charlotte Gresham married Campbell Taylor, the son of Mary Yeats Bussell and Patrick Taylor, in 1883. They lived on Thomas River Station near Esperance, which he took up and pioneered in the 1870s. Charlotte had arrived between 1880 and 1882 from Victoria to join her sisters in Albany where the four Misses Gresham ran a private school. One married Edward Dempster of Esperance, another became the Dempster Governess.
Charlotte collected botanical specimens for Baron von Mueller. The location was isolated until the goldrushes of the 1890s when Esperance developed as a gateway to the goldfields.
Charlotte was a member of the Wilgie Sketching. She exhibited with the club in their only exhibition in 1890. Her entries were of Bald Head and King George’s Sound. She also painted wildflowers. She exhibited quite a number of oil paintings An Old Farm; Road near Albany, several of wildflowers and watercolours of Melbourne with the West Australian Society of Arts in 1903 and paintings and a screen in 1904.
In a tragic accident going in the cart to vote in the Federal referendum in 1900, Campbell was fatally injured. His wife abandoned their station after 1904 and returned to Melbourne where one sister lived, and wrote for the papers about life on the south coast of Western Australia. In 1903 a Mrs C. Taylor is listed as an art teacher in West Australian Chambers, St George’s Terrace, Perth. This may well have been her as she exhibited with the West Australian Society of Arts that year and the next before she returned to Melbourne.
- Writers:
- Dr Dorothy Erickson
- Date written:
- 2010
- Last updated:
- 2011
