Two remarkable CAM volunteers welcomed our esteemed visitors, Honorary conservator Deborah Peart and CAM Guide James McArdle. In this reflection James McArdle consolidates and develops the available knowledge about the artist. CAM readers will be the first to become acquainted with this excellent research on Mary Meyer, an Australian artist we should all know more about.

Castlemaine Art Museum has in its collection this untitled painting by Melbourne artist Mary Meyer (1878–1975). Little known and represented in few of the major texts on Australian impressionist painters, her work has only recently been appearing at auction; perhaps a hopeful sign of her re-evaluation.

Inspection of the CAM painting and its technique shows that she really is worth more attention.

Meyer’s oil sketch bears comparison for its subject matter with Dora Meeson’s; we might wonder if these two men are fishing in the Thames as in about 1902 Mary was in England. She traveled with her student colleague Ursula Foster, model for E. P. Fox's Lady in Black and A Love Story, just as Mary was for his Whistleresque Portrait of Mary, Daughter of Professor Nanson. Now held in the National Gallery of Victoria he showed it at a 1898 exhibition of Australian Art at the Grafton Galleries, London.

The women studied together at the Westminster School of Art and at the Slade before touring and painting throughout Europe. Mary’s fishermen subjects offer no clues; but aren’t their hats more Australian? They could as easily be unemployed workers of the Great Depression fishing in the Yarra, for whom their occupation is more for sustenance than sport. That she traveled again to England and Europe in 1927 complicates knowing the locale of the undated work.

Because she was wealthy, Mary painted for pleasure, feeling no need to exhibit, her only solo show being a retrospective at the Lyceum Club of which she was a founder. She bequeathed to public galleries 300 works from her collection, paintings by Bunny, Streeton, Fox, Heyson, Roberts and others. Her own work remained obscure. Juliet Peers proposes that her marriage to the twenty years older Jewish obstetrician and gynecologist Professor Felix Meyer, caused a rift with Mary's family; ‘her art collecting and the production of a prolific oeuvre of small plein-air works…compensated her for a degree of social ostracism [due to] her inter-faith marriage, a generation before Jewish radicals became to a great degree the conscience and leaders of Melbourne cultural life’

Indeed, Mary’s name is only recorded in two group shows; a 1916 auction of artworks in support of the French Red Cross, and the 1907 First Exhibition of Women's Work at the Exhibition Buildings at which she won Best Seascape for another waterside image; A Sorrento Lime Boat painted that year (and now in the National Gallery of Australia collection).

Coincidentally, Mary’s middle name was Fisher—but it is her application of Impressionism that engages us in Two Figures Fishing. The French style is evident, more crudely, in the pointilliste dabs of her self-portrait. It was made before, or early in, her studies with E. Phillips Fox and Tudor St George Tucker, themselves both products of French art schools, at their Melbourne School of Art and its summer school Charterisville that they had established in the old mansion above the Yarra River in East Ivanhoe.

Two Figures Fishing is painted more thinly and rapidly than the self-portrait, with a mature economy of style and canny facility; see how, to represent ripples on deep water, she has reserved the woodgrain of the cedar panel on which she has made this oil sketch.

James McArdle

January 2025