Design and Art Australia Online

sculptor and jeweller, was born in Sydney on 31 December 1911. After attending North Sydney Girls High School, she entered the art classes of East Sydney Technical College in 1929 where she specialised in sculpture under Rayner Hoff. She graduated with her Diploma of Art (Sculpture Hons) in 1934. Only three major works are known to be extant from this period. One of three bronze relief sculptures cast from Woman with Horses, which had been completed in plaster for her diploma show at the National Art School in 1934 and exhibited there and at the Blaxland Galleries in 1935, was auctioned at Christie’s Sydney on 14-15 August 1994, lot 181. Her major work submitted for her sculpture diploma was Abundance 1934 (cast 1987), a pierced relief bronze 130 × 68 × 7 cm; inscr. verso (base) 'Jean Broome’, purchased by the Art Gallery of NSW in 1985. It is a particularly significant example of that 'modernised classicism’ which characterised the sculpture of those influenced by Rayner Hoff in the interwar decades.

The female sculptors of East Sydney Technical College and Hoff established, through their interest in the issues of sexuality and procreation via vitalist principles, links with European postwar social tendencies. Their intense interest in the definition and exploration of biologically differentiated male and female energies (creation/procreation) as complementary forces in the creation of a whole was manifested in decades when the middle classes in Europe and Australia became particularly susceptible to pressures to `breed back’ the replacements of those who had died in war. Broome-Norton became an important member of this group of (predominantly female) sculpture students at East Sydney Technical College whom Hoff developed into a coherent 'school’ of sculptors that dominated Sydney sculptural production in the interwar decades. Among her fellow students were Barbara Tribe, Marjorie Fletcher, Eileen McGrath and Lyndon Dadswell.

“In Abundance the vitalist union is evoked structurally through the male, female and child — the (pro)creative result of their union. Art Deco streamlining of the wreath, hair, wheat and sharply truncated limbs is coupled with exaggerated musculature in order to represent athleticism, fecundity and health in both the male and female figures. The sources of the work are diverse; Hoff’s earlier sculptures are influential and there are intimations of Donatello’s putti in the child who is grasping his mother’s leg in a gesture that reinforces the importance of her procreative role. The virile male who kneels at her foot in a pose reminiscent of Rodin’s Eternal Idol reinforces this image of ultimately traditional gender roles. As well as carrying a quite personal meaning for the artist (symbolically depicting herself, her future husband and the son they hoped to have), Abundance is an optimistic, life-affirming emblem of Australia which gives little indication of its conception during the worst years of the Depression. In it, through the duality of combining classicised figures with those symbolising modern Australians (both the timeless and the specific), Broome-Norton deals with national myths as they are substantiated by the moral authority of classical tradition.”(Edwards)

Broome-Norton’s sculpture is now represented in most state galleries in Australia. She exhibited with the NSW Society of Artists between 1931 and 1938 and taught part-time at East Sydney in 1935. She worked as an assistant to Hoff in 1936 on the King George V monument, Canberra – a work she completed, with George Moorefield, after Hoff’s death in 1937.

Broome-Norton also provided plaster murals for various hotels and buildings, including the Twentieth Century Fox building in Sydney, before commencing work as a jewellery designer with Hardy Brothers in Sydney, where she remained for 15 years. Among her most important works was a brooch presented to Princess Alexandra by the Australian Government. In 1995 Broome-Norton was still living in Sydney and taking private classes in sculpture.

Writers:

Edwards, Deborah

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

2011