Watercolourist, teacher and illustrator. Born in Sydney in 1898, Phyllis Tindall was the youngest child, and only known daughter, born to Charles and Mary Tindall. Her early interest in art seems to have come from her father who was a notable watercolour artist best known for his many images of ships on Sydney Harbour. Her older brother, M.C. Tindall, was also an artist.
Despite her birth name, Phyllis was known professionally as 'Nessie Tindall’, this forename being a Scottish colloquial shortening for the fabled Loch Ness monster, and may be a nickname given to Phyllis by her father who was born in Scotland. Nessie made her artistic debut aged (approximately) ten at the annual spring show of the Royal Art Society (RAS), where she exhibited four watercolours priced from three to ten guineas. In the July/August 1913 issue of The Salon (the journal of the Institute of Architects of NSW) Nessie Tindall was listed as being the First Prize Scholarship Winner of the RAS Students’ Annual Exhibition. A well observed pencil study of a nude woman by the artist was illustrated on page 37 of this 1913 publication.
Nessie exhibited almost every year with the RAS from 1910-22 and advertised her availability to teach “outdoor lessons in landscape painting” in the Society’s annual exhibition catalogue several times during that period, the first time being in 1915 when she was aged only seventeen. In 1915 she was living at her parents’ home in Gordon Road, Lindfield, while working from a studio at Norwich Chambers, 56 Hunter Street, Sydney.
Tindall’s last involvement with the RAS was in 1922 when she exhibited two works at the annual spring show. Late that year her father, along with several other longstanding members, was removed from the RAS executive council. This snub to her father’s reputation may explain why she stopped exhibiting with the RAS, even though her father returned to exhibiting with the Society in the late 1920s. While her father was a foundation member of the Australian Watercolour Institute (AWI) in 1924, Nessie never exhibited with the AWI, despite being proficient in the medium. In the 1925 Sands Directory she was listed as “lady tracer” (for the record a lady-tracer was an early twentieth century position; women would copy detailed plans in architectural or engineering offices by carefully tracing the original, this trade ended with the invention of mechanical copying machines after World War II).
During the early 1920s Nessie contributed several cartoons to The Bulletin . These were all ink wash joke blocks, such as: 'She was no gambler’ (22 July 1920, pg 18); 'When great minds, etc’ (7 October 1920, pg 16); 'A stitch in time’ (28 October 1920, pg 14); 'Great work’, (24 July 1924, pg 19); and 'A woman of her word’ (21 August 1924, pg 16).
In 1928 she married bank clerk Oswald Ernest Piper. It is unclear whether she abandoned her art after her marriage. While electoral roles in 1930 and 1936 list Tindall doing “home duties” rather than working as an artist, Sands Directory lists her working from a studio at 10 Bligh Street up to 1932. The last known work created by the artist is a simple pen line image of flannel flowers that was used as the frontispiece for A first-year Australian Botany by Elsie A. Cooke and Myrtle Gillham (Dymocks Book Arcade, Sydney, 1932). Nellie Tindall died, aged in her in her early fifties, in 1950.
- Writers:
- Clifford-Smith, Silas
- Date written:
- 2009
- Last updated:
- 2011
