Painter, mural painter, modeller, puppet-maker, theatre and diorama artist, Clothilde Highton was born in Kangaroo Point, Brisbane, daughter of Major D.R. Harris DSM and his wife, Bertha, of the pioneering pastoral Collins family. Clothilde was raised on the family property, Eurara, at Tamrookum near Beaudesert, where she was privately educated by a governess. She studied art at the Brisbane Central Technical College under L.J. Harvey and Martyn Collins in the early 1930s, then worked in Sydney for a time. There she met, and in 1940 married, Lieutenant Michael Howard Highton RN. He was posted missing after the sinking of HMAS Perth in the Battle Of Sunda Strait in 1942; she was officially informed of his death in 1946. Soon afterwards, Clothilde and their five-year-old daughter, Caryl, left for London. Her watercolour paintings executed in the early years, mainly Australian snow-gum scenes, were sold to art-lovers and collectors from all over the world. She also worked for a local pottery in Sussex, making dressing-table ornaments and cat figures in large numbers, anything at all that was required of her, simply to ensure an income to support herself and her young daughter until she became well-known.
Clothilde came to be highly regarded as a sculptor in England in the 1940s and early 50s. Her work was largely in the repair and reconstruction of external statuary severely damaged in the bombing of London during the blitz. She had invented a synthetic stone, a combination of cement and silicas that resembled natural stone in appearance and aged and weathered exactly like the real thing. For this work she was in great demand. Any person looking at the work would be hard-pressed to tell the original parts of figures from the repaired sections.
In London, Highton met and studied painting with the Australian artist Will Longstaff. Longstaff was making dioramas for Australia House, London, and after seeing Highton’s large religious figures encouraged her to make dioramas too. In three months she had made and sold her first diorama to the Mowbray Gallery. Her Castles and Carriages toured provincial England and was shown in London. She produced scenery and costumes for operettas, murals, displays and puppet theatres. The major work she undertook in England was a larger than life size Crucifix with subsidiary figures of Mary and and St John, for St Nicholas’ Anglican Church in Arundel, Sussex. It was included in the religious art section of the 1951 Festival of Britain, resulting in her being elected a member of the Guild of Memorial Craftsmen of Great Britain that year (membership was restricted to fifty, five of whom were women). The figures were originally placed above and behind the altar in front of the rood screen separating the church from the Fitzalan Howard Chapel (the private – Catholic – Chapel of the Duke of Norfolk) which adjoined it. Recently the figures have been placed in the garden of the church, under the branches of a flowering cherry tree, with Arundel Castle in the background.
Clothilde also undertook private commissions for statues and other large works for domestic garden settings, and executed a portrait bust of Lord Gowrie, then Governor of Windsor Castle, where she stayed while making the clay model for the work. While there she also did several small watercolour paintings of the Queen Mother’s private gardens. When Clothilde was constructing some of her larger diorama series Lavinia, Duchess of Norfolk, offered her a very large hall in Arundel Castle in which she could spread out and work uninterrupted. The only visitors were the Duchess herself, and on one occasion, the Queen when she was staying at the castle to inspect some of her horses that were kept there.
Clothilde wrote a Nativity play, 'The Cradle of the Dove’, for performance in St Nicholas’ church, Arundel, which required a special dispensation from the Bishop. This play was later performed at St Michael and All Angels at New Farm in Brisbane in 1961, with her three-week old granddaughter Gaynor playing the baby Jesus. The play was in verse, and incorporated singing and dance, and was accompanied by songs from the Oxford Book of Carols and anthems from the Book of Common Prayer.
In the fifties, Clothilde designed and made unique Christmas windows for the department store Allan & Stark (later Myer) when she returned to Brisbane, by reproducing with life-sized figures some of the most famous religious paintings by the Old Masters, such as The Madonna of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci. These were huge dioramas, a combination of painting, sculpture, lighting and fabrics and were very popular with Christmas shoppers. Highton exhibited Coronations through the Ages in Brisbane in 1953, then toured it to other state capitals. As a result of its popular appeal she was commissioned by Qantas to produce Fifty Years of Flight , shown in Farmers Gallery at Sydney and Georges Gallery, Melbourne. Australia’s Links with the Crown , consisting of ten dioramas, was executed for the 1954 Royal Tour; Fashion Fads and Fancies , twenty-four dioramas depicting ’2,000 years of fashion’, was shown at Ball & Welchs, Melbourne, and at Anthony Horderns, Sydney in 1955.
She turned her hand to the production of other theatrical enterprises, including puppets for the Queensland Road Safety Police in 1959 and the Spastic Children’s Centre in 1960. She designed many displays for firms in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, as well as exhibits for the Queensland Industries Fairs from 1955. But the advent of television in Australia largely destroyed the popular appeal of dioramas and she stopped producing them.
Highton cared for her widowed father and, later, remarried and moved to Ormiston. Between 1947 and 1963 she had occasionally exhibited paintings with the Royal Queensland Art Society and from 1964 exhibited with the Yurara Art Group, of which she was a founding member (it merged with the Royal Queensland Art Society in 1983). Her paintings were also hung in the Redlands Art Prize competition in the 1960s, a prize that she inaugurated through the Yurara Art Group sponsored by the Redland Shire Councel.
Eventually Highton moved back to the bush not far from where she’d grown up, retiring to a farm at Boonah, where she still painted, but also bred Arabian horses, her great love, for the last years of her life. Clothilde died in Brisbane on 7 June 1980, and was buried in the private Collins family section at All Saints’ church, Tamrookum, Queensland on 10 June 1980. She left one daughter, five grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.
- Writers:
- Cooke, Glenn R.
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 2013
