Florence Fuller

Biography

Florence Fuller was a noted painter who enjoyed significant international success in the late 19th century. Her artistic reputation waned in the latter part of her life and after her death, although her work is now found in major Australian public collections. A devotee of theosophy, she wrestled with the challenge of making a living as a portraitist while desiring to paint ‘something deeper’.

Born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa in 1867, Fuller migrated with her family to Australia as a child. She showed early artistic talent and from the age of 12 took lessons from Jane Sutherland, who was one of the Australian Impressionists who painted at Heidelberg. By 16, in 1883, she had enrolled to study painting and drawing at Melbourne’s National Gallery School. She remained there for a year, returning for further study in 1888. Fuller’s uncle was the renowned portrait painter Robert Dowling, and she studied with him from 1884 to 1886. A visiting French artist, Monsieur de la Crouee, also provided private lessons.

By the age of 20, Fuller had left her job as a governess and devoted herself full time to art, primarily as a portrait and landscape painter. At the first exhibition of the Victorian Artists Society in 1889, she won the prize for best portrait painted by an artist under 25.
Fuller exhibited regularly with the art societies in Melbourne and her work sold well. These sales, and commissions, particularly for portraits, allowed her to make her living as an artist with financial independence, rare for women at the time.

Fuller’s painting Weary 1888 in the Art Gallery of New South Wales collection was painted around this time. Juxtaposing an innocent child against tattered marketing billboards, the work has a sense of urban realism that is arguably unprecedented in Australian art.

During the 1890s, Fuller furthered her studies at the Académie Julian in Paris and exhibited at Manchester Art Gallery in England, the Royal Academy and Royal Institute of Oil Painters in London, and the Paris Salon, where she was hung ‘on the line’, which was considered a real measure of success. She sent work back to Australia and exhibited regularly with the Victorian Artists Society and the NSW Society of Artists as well as in Jane Sutherland’s studio. The Art Gallery of New South Wales purchased a painting by Fuller, French village, from the Federal Exhibition: Art Society of New South Wales in 1901 but deaccessioned it in 1946 after her death.

Fuller’s success abroad was reported in the Australian media and added to her reputation back home, enabling her to again support herself through her art on her return to Australia in 1904, where she settled in Perth. She subsidised her income from her painting with teaching, with Kathleen O’Connor and Daisy Rossi among her students.

In 1905 Fuller met Charles Leadbetter, an influential member of the Theosophical Society, which led to her lifelong commitment to theosophy. She joined the Perth society, serving as the group’s treasurer, secretary and librarian at various times, and making her studio available to the society for meetings.

In 1908 the then president of the society, Annie Besant, toured Australia and visited Fuller’s studio. Fuller was invited to live in the theosophists’ compound in Adyar, India, where she stayed from 1909 to 1911. Fuller said she went there in search of ‘beauty and light, and colour, and the picturesque in general, which delight the eye and emotions of all artists’. She painted portraits of the theosophist leaders, including Leadbetter and Besant, as well as a highly unusual portrait of Buddha which, with modernistic flat planes of colour with little shadow, is radically different from her other portraits.

Leaving India, Fuller went to England, where the reality of making a living as a portrait painter, which required capturing a person’s likeness, did not fit well with her desire to distinguish between the physical body and spiritual self, which was central to her commitment to theosophy. In 1913 she wrote: ‘I have painted a great many portraits since I have been in England, and I have been, I suppose fairly successful – though I have done nothing in any way remarkable. The hidden inner life has not yet succeeded in expressing itself on canvas, and I can only write myself as one who aspires to a greater art but has not yet achieved it.’

On her return to Australia in 1916, Fuller settled in the Sydney suburb of Mosman. She held numerous teaching positions, exhibited with the Society of Artists and began to paint miniatures.

In the last 20 years of her life, with increasingly poor health, Fuller was no longer able to paint. At the age of 60, she was committed to Gladesville Mental Asylum (as it was then known) where she died in straitened circumstances on 17 July 1946.