Lilla Reidy Art for Sale at Auction

b. 1858 - d. 1933

Lilla Reidy, sketcher and painter, exhibited regularly with the Victorian Artists' Society from 1895 to 1910. During the 1890s she worked at Charterisville with Emanuel Phillips Fox and Tudor St George Tucker. She was influenced by the Heidelberg School painters.

sketcher, seemed to be the artist, (mis)catalogued as 'Lila Raidy 1880’, who was said to have signed a pencil, charcoal and ink panoramic view of Port Arthur, Tasmania, when the drawing was auctioned by Gowan’s of Hobart on 4 November 2000 (lot 209). Advertising in the Hobart Mercury of 24 January 1880, 'Miss Reidy’ offered to teach painting, wax flowers and fancy work in its various branches. However, when the drawing was re-offered by Masterpiece Gallery in September 2002 (cat. 8), Heather Curnow had identified it as one of a series of amateur drawings of the settlement, all done on the same paper c.1845 before the reclamation of the harbour (c.1849).

Slightly different views are in the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, Tas., and Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW; a third, now lost, was photographed by Stephen Spurling c.1920 – photograph in National Library of Australia, Canberra, ACT – while a later, damaged version dated 1849 is in Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, Tas. Lilla Reidy signed an unusual and competent Heidelberg School oil on canvas on board landscape (45 × 70 cm) with an Aboriginal woman in a long blanket cloak standing in front of a bark hut beside a giant hollow tree in the bush. The painting, acquired by James Fairfax from Thirty Victoria Street, was offered by Sotheby’s in the ...

Flourished - fl. c.1880 - c.1910