Design and Art Australia Online

painter and professional photographer, was born in England on 15 April 1835, second daughter of Amelia and Maurice Felton . She arrived at Sydney on 27 September 1839 on board the Royal Admiral with her parents, her unmarried aunt Myra Felton, her brother Maurice and two sisters. Too young to have learned more than an enthusiasm for art from her father before his death in 1842, Myra Felton is said to have taken lessons from Marshall Claxton when he was in Sydney between 1850 and 1854. She may also have learnt oil painting from James Armstrong Wilson . Maurice Felton’s death had left his widow and large family impoverished. As soon as she was able Myra worked to help support them 'in the galleries of some of our most popular photographists as a finisher in colours’. Then, in January 1859, she opened her own studio – 'Miss M. Felton’s Photographic Gallery’ – in the family home on the south side of Hunter Street, Sydney, two doors below Phillip Street. She rapidly set herself up in a separate studio, being recorded as working from 421 George Street that same year. With no male figure behind the enterprise Felton seems to have been one of the first independent, professional women photographers in the colony. The Sydney Morning Herald of 26 February 1859 reported that her coloured photographic portraits were 'highly satisfactory and beautifully artistic’, but no surviving examples are known from this time.

Although advertising solely as a 'photographic artist’ Felton always seems to have worked as a portrait painter too. The Herald of 25 February 1859 commended her studio on the grounds that the photographic process 'has induced many portrait painters to give it their serious and practical attention. The result has been that the skill of the artist has given power and beauty to photography’, implying that she considered herself primarily a portrait painter even then. In 1867 Felton was listed in Sands Sydney Directory as 'artist and teacher of drawing’ at 69 Wynyard Square West and was advertising exclusively as an 'artist’ (painter), though this did not necessarily exclude photography as a secondary activity. Some of her paintings certainly continued to be developed from photographs, such as a small painting of five Scotch terriers exhibited in the Sydney Horticultural Society’s exhibition in November 1866 by Mr J.J. Calvert. Nevertheless, whether aided by photography or not, painting was now Myra Felton’s life’s work. She appears to have been one of the first colonial photographers to have made this (reverse) change. Newspaper reviewers continued to write glowingly of her pictures, always as if they were original paintings, but like other painter-photographers – Thomas Price and Victor Prout , for instance – many of her portraits were based on photographs while some seem to have been painted over an enlarged photographic base. Felton’s oval pastel on paper on canvas portrait of a young girl with scotch terrier (555 × 46 cm) was probably of Lucy Fitzgerald (1850-1939), daughter of Elizabeth Henrietta Rouse and Robert Fitzgerald, since it was discovered at 'Dabec’, the Rouse family’s rural property at Rylstone, along with a pastel of her mother (now Historic Houses Trust NSW). It also looks as if it has a photographic base (ill. Sotheby’s “Australia 2000” sale, Sydney, 16 August 2000, lot 328).

In June 1866, when Felton’s oval 'crayon’ (pastel) portrait of the late Dr Woolley in his Sydney University chancellor’s robes was praised, she was described as 'a lady artist whose talents have been unreservedly recognised by all who have had an opportunity of seeing the noble results of her labours at the easel’. The critic recommended that the Sydney Mechanics Institute purchase the portrait (now at the University of Sydney). Later that year, her 'Coloured Drawing of the late G.V. Brooke’ in the role of Virginius, said to be a 'spirited specimen of the skill of a New South Wales artist’, was forwarded to the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition. Her pastel, Mother and Child was shown at Sydney’s Intercolonial Exhibition in 1870 and was thought deserving of 'special mention’ by both the Herald and the Sydney Mail . Two untitled portraits (one oil and one pastel) were shown with the New South Wales Academy of Art in 1872, while works by her pupils were shown at a conversazione held by the academy in October 1874 and at subsequent exhibitions.

Large pastel portraits by 'Myra Felton after Bolton [possibly a misprint for the photographer E. Dalton ]’ of the Rev. and Mrs John West, editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and his wife, were donated to the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, by the Wests’ son-in-law. Her pastel portrait of William Pitt Faithfull (1867), which also appears to have a photographic base, is in the National Library of Australia. Her oil portrait of Samuel Wensley Blackall, Governor of Queensland, was painted on commission for the Legislative Assembly Chambers of Queensland Parliament House in 1868.

In about 1869 Felton opened an 'Art Academy’ in Brougham Street, off William Street, where she taught painting for many years. She also taught art to girls, advertising in 1870 that she attended 'families and schools and takes pupils at her residence 121 Castlereagh Street’. Her Art Academy was still in existence in 1888 when the Aldine Centenary History of New South Wales commended 'the number of her pupils who have taken prizes in public competitions’.

Felton wrote a novel, Eena Romney; or, Word-Pictures of Home-Life in New South Wales , published at Sydney in 1887 in aid of the Queen’s Fund for Distressed Women. A pious melodrama of the 'upright city gentleman confronts and reforms evil bushman’ genre, it has a poor heroine from Sydney who is fond of sketching and may contain some romanticised autobiography.

For many years before her death, on or about 13 July 1920, aged 85, Felton lived at Goodhope Street, Paddington, NSW. She befriended her brother Maurice’s daughter Amelia, whom she instructed in painting and to whom she bequeathed most of her paintings. Unfortunately, almost all were destroyed after Amelia’s death in 1955, aged 91. She and Amelia were interred in the same plot at Waverley Cemetery in Sydney, NSW.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011