Design and Art Australia Online

painter, was born in Edinburgh, one of the three daughters of the miniature painter and later photographer Peter Devine, and Catherine, née Rae. She and her sisters studied drawing and painting under their father and from the age of fifteen Mary exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy. In 1875 she married Frederick Wahab Stoddard, a medical student, son of General Stoddard. They settled near Auckland (NZ) about 1878, aiming to farm. In 1880 they moved to Sydney and Stoddard resumed the career that had been interrupted by her marriage, exhibiting with the Art Society of NSW that same year. Lady Darley, noted 'A.B.’ in Cosmos , was among the first to recognise her ability and commissioned a watercolour portrait of her daughter, Sylvia, who was just out of babyhood. Mary’s sister Catherine (Katie) Devine , who lived with the Stoddards in Sydney for a time before returning to work in London, was also a painter (Stephen Sheding used to own a work by her); so was the eldest sister, who died aged 27.

In 1881 Stoddard won first prize of 15 guineas in John Sands Christmas card competition that had attracted 661 entries, judged by E. Combes, E.L. Montefiore and E du Faur, with her watercolour A Fairy Boat with Fairies (a night scene of a gondolier filled with fairies and elves). An allegorical painting, Spring , was engraved for the Sydney Mail in September 1883, and in 1884 Gathering Wattle was engraved for the Xmas supplement of the Illustrated Sydney News . In 1886 she won the £100 prize for a design for a coloured supplement to the Sydney Mail 's Christmas issue with Christmas Bells (a child of 4-5 seated on a log with an armful). She won various gold, silver and bronze medals for oil and watercolour paintings at the 1884-85 Wealth and Industrial Exhibition and at the 1888 Women’s Industries Exhibition, Sydney. (At the latter, she won 3 first prizes, one gold medal and two silver ones for 'Best Water Colour’, 'Best Portrait in Oils’, 'Best Flowers in Oil’ and the Hunters Hill Prize for 'Best Flower Painting’ She was also a member of the committee organising the exhibition, which resulted in £6,000 being handed to the Queen’s Fund.) In 1888 she also won the 100-guinea design competition for the award certificate for the Melbourne Centennial International Exhibition. Hers also was the prize design for the £1 postage stamp in the Centennial series.

Oil paintings by Stoddard include Annabel Lee (1881, unlocated) and portraits of Sir Henry Parkes (Parliament House, Sydney) – considered 'one of the best extant’, according to Cosmos in 1896 – and of E.C. Merewether (Australian Club), although she was thought 'unrivalled as a painter of women and children’. From Earth and Ocean (1889), a still life, was purchased by the National Gallery of NSW. In 1896 Cosmos noted that she had shown work in almost every art exhibition for more than sixteen years (1881 to 1896). She was best known in her lifetime for The Lorelei (unlocated), a nude shown with the Art Society of NSW in 1889 for sale at £120, which received much favourable comment (and was illustrated with a line drawing in the catalogue). She also painted seascapes and landscapes.

Stoddard was on the Council of the Art Society of NSW – one of only two women – and was recognised as one of the most accomplished painters in Sydney. She taught art and had completed a large body of work, mainly portraits and miniatures, when her health failed in 1888. 'I have been so prostrate as to be unable to keep appointments on which a great portion of our income has to depend’, she wrote to Henry Parkes, asking him to appoint her husband, a clerk in the Colonial Secretary’s Office, to the Agent General’s Office in London, in which city she hoped both to regain her health and achieve artistic recognition. Although this did not eventuate, she finally settled there with her daughters in 1900 but died on 10 June 1901 after surgery. She was survived by her husband, still employed in Sydney, their son and three daughters: Edith, Mary Irene and Enid .

A watercolour portrait of Mrs E.E. Martin and a watercolour address presented to Earl Beauchamp (Governor of NSW) by the Art Society of NSW in 1899 are in the Mitchell Library.

While the mount of this painting bears the name `Miss Devine’ in pencil and the title Coming Home from the Bush , it is undoubtedly the work of the same title by Catherine Devine’s sister, Mary Stoddard (née Devine), described by the Sydney Morning Herald art critic as ' Two prettily-featured girls, one carrying a pet dog, face the observer, and are pleasingly set off by the greenery in the background.’ It was entered in a competition for paintings on Australian themes held by the Sydney printer and publisher John Sands in 1881 and won Stoddard first prize in the second division (for paintings incorporating both figures and animals). The misattribution is likely to have arisen through confusion with Catherine Devine’s painting Off the Track , which showed two girls laden with wild flowers who have strayed from their path and are peering into the darkening bush. Off the Track , which appears to have been influenced by Coming Home from the Bush , won Devine ninth prize in a similar competition held by the rival Sydney printing and publishing firm, Gibbs, Shallard & Co., in 1882.

In Coming Home from the Bush the painstaking delineation of such features as the dogs’ coats and the broderie anglaise of the girls’ dresses and the combination of fine brushwork with stippling in the background doubtless reflect techniques Stoddard learnt from her father, the Edinburgh miniaturist Peter Devine. The subject reflects the nationalistic mood of the 1880s and the associated passion for wildflowers. Wildflower exhibitions, organised largely by women, were annual events in some Sydney suburbs in the 1880s and 1890s and wildflower gathering became a popular subject with local painters and black-and-white artists. Such pictures were usually of a quasi-allegorical nature, both expressing nationalism and idealising female beauty. Stoddard’s watercolour, Gathering Wildflowers , exhibited with the Art Society in 1885 and published as the colour supplement to the Illustrated Sydney News of 18 December 1886, was one such work; it shows a woman among a profusion of native bush and flowers. In Coming Home from the Bush the children are used as an image of youthful female beauty and innocence. The two girls stand with interlinked arms, one carrying a small dog and bearing a handful of boronia, the other beside an Irish wolfhound, her arms laden with bottle-brush and other native flowers. The background shows the greenery of the Australian bush and the yellow tints of a blossoming wattle. The figures occupy almost the entire foreground of the picture but are not confrontational; their gazes are respectfully wistful and demure.

Stoddard frequently depicted children sentimentally, both in portrait and genre works-'turning children into angels’ as was commented of her child portraits. Her sentimental child genre scenes included Cornstalks and Waratahs , a boy and a girl with wildflowers engraved for the Illustrated Sydney News in December 1884, and a prize-winning design of a child holding Christmas bells engraved for the Sydney Mail 's Christmas issue in 1886. Her success in competitions was not just the result of her considerable talent but of a formula, the separate ingredients of which-native floral imagery and idealised and sentimental portrayals of women and children-had wide contemporary appeal.

Writers:

Lennon, Jane

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

2011