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Florence Ada Fuller (1867 – 17 July 1946) 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, except for a return to South Africa in 1899 to paint a portrait of Rhodes. 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 work, 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. Highly regarded during her active career as a portrait and landscape painter, by 1914 Fuller was represented in four public galleries—three in Australia and one in South Africa—a record for a woman who was an Australian painter at that time. In 1927 she began almost twenty years of institutionalization in a mental asylum, however, and her death went without notice. After her death, information about her work frequently was omitted from reference works about Australian painters and knowledge of her work became obscure even though her paintings are held in public art collections including the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Australia's National Portrait Gallery. ==Early life and career== Florence Fuller was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, in 1867, a daughter of Louisa and John Hobson Fuller. She had several siblings, including sisters Amy and Christie, both of whom subsequently became singers. The family migrated to Australia when Florence was a child. She worked as a governess while undertaking studies in art, and first took classes at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in 1883, then again for a further term of study in 1888. During this period she was a student of Jane Sutherland, referred to in the ''Australian Dictionary of Biography'' as "the leading female artist in the group of Melbourne painters who broke with the nineteenth-century tradition of studio art by sketching and painting directly from nature". Fuller's uncle was Robert Hawker Dowling, a painter of orientalist and Aboriginal subjects, as well as portraits and miniatures. British-born, he had grown up in Tasmania and made a living there as a portraitist, before returning to his native England at age thirty. For the next two decades, his works were frequently hung at the Royal Academy. He returned to Australia in 1885, and Fuller became his pupil. In that year, aged eighteen, Fuller received a commission from Ann Fraser Bon, philanthropist and supporter of Victoria's Aboriginal people. The commission was for ''Barak–last chief of the Yarra Yarra Tribe of Aborigines'', a formal oil on canvas portrait of the Indigenous Australian leader, William Barak. Ultimately, that painting was acquired by the State Library of Victoria. Although the painting is an important work regularly used to illustrate this significant figure in Australia's history, interpretations of Fuller's portrait are mixed: one critic noted the painting's objectivity and avoidance of romanticising Aboriginal people,〔 while another concluded that "Fuller is painting an ideal rather than a person". In 1886, Dowling returned to his native England. Giving up her work as a governess, Fuller began to paint full-time, and had opened her own studio before she had turned twenty.〔 Dowling had intended to return to Australia and had left behind an incomplete portrait of the Victorian governor's wife, Lady Loch. He died, however, not long after arriving in England; Fuller then completed Dowling's commission. Lady Loch became her patron.〔 Other early portraits followed: two pictures of homeless children, entitled ''Weary'' (inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem on child labour "Weariness") and ''Desolate'', in 1888; and ''Gently Reproachful'' circa 1889. ''Weary'' was acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2015. The gallery's curator of Australian art described the depiction of billboard posters in the painting as giving it a "sense of gritty realism that was arguably unprecedented in Australian art." Also in 1889, Fuller was awarded a prize by the Victorian Artists Society for best portrait by an artist under twenty-five.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Florence Fuller」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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