Dora L Wilson
Research toward a catalogue raisonne – FREE download below
Dora Lynnell Wilson was born in Newcastle Upon Tyne, in England on the 31st of August 1883, the second of four children born to James and Annie Maria Wilson (nee Green). The family immigrated to Australia on board the Iberia from Plymouth in 1885 and settled in Melbourne.
In her late teens, Dora was inspired by an exhibition of etchings by Anders Zorn held in the National Gallery of Victoria collection. Keen to try it for herself, Wilson later bought a press of her own and made several landscape etchings of scenes around Melbourne and Tasmania. Although etching constituted some of her earliest artistic output, Wilson is best known today for her oil paintings documenting Melbourne’s CBD.
Dora was educated at the National Gallery School from 1901 to 1907 under the tutorage of Bernard Hall and Fredrick McCubbin. She became close friends with fellow students Norah Gurdon, Jessie C.A. Traill and Janet Cumbrae Stewart and like Jessie, received lessons in etching from John Mathers.
Early in her career, Wilson was working in pastels, producing portraits and nudes in a similar style as Cumbrae Stewart with whom she may have been sharing a studio and models. In the late 1920s she spent 2 years travelling Europe with life-long friend and companion, the talented magazine photographer Pegg Clarke, in a car they dubbed “pepperpot” because she was hot stuff. Whilst there she held two solo exhibitions in London in 1929, at the Beaux Arts Gallery and Australia House. She also contributed works to the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the Women Painters exhibitions.
Wilson and Clarke returned home to Melbourne together by the SS Morton Bay in September of 1929 and set up a studio in Glenferrie Road, Hawthorn, where Wilson continued to paint street scenes and historic buildings as she had begun to do during her time in Europe.
Dora died shortly after falling ill in 1946. She is represented by most Australian state and National Galleries and several Melbourne regional galleries as well as the Worcester City Gallery in the UK. To learn more about Dora’s life and work, download the free catalogue below.
