Florence Fuller

Who was Florence Fuller?

Florence Ada Fuller was a South African-born Australian artist. Originally from Port Elizabeth, Fuller migrated as a child to Melbourne with her family. There she trained with her uncle Robert Hawker Dowling and teacher Jane Sutherland and took classes at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, becoming a professional artist in the late 1880s. In 1892 she left Australia, travelling first to South Africa, where she met and painted for Cecil Rhodes, and then on to Europe. She lived and studied there for the subsequent decade, apart from a return to South Africa in 1899 to paint Rhodes' portrait. Between 1895 and 1904 her works were exhibited at the Paris Salon and London's Royal Academy.

In 1904, Fuller returned to Australia, living in Perth. She became active in the Theosophical Society and painted some of her best-known works, including A Golden Hour, described by the National Gallery of Australia as a "masterpiece" when it acquired the work in 2013. Beginning in 1908, Fuller travelled extensively, living in India and England before ultimately settling in Sydney. There, she was the inaugural teacher of life drawing at the School of Fine and Applied Arts established in 1920 by the New South Wales Society of Women Painters. She died in 1946.