Lot 34: Dora Meeson , Australian 1869-1955 ON A CHELSEA BALCONY Oil on canvas

Signed and dated D. Meeson 1912 (lower left); bears artist's name and title on reverse Oil on canvas

91.5 by 78.5cm

(possibly) 5th London Salon of the Allied Artists' Association, Albert Hall, London, July 1912
Paintings by George Coates and Dora Meeson (Mrs Coates), Athenaeum Art Gallery, Melbourne, 7-19 July 1913, cat 29 (30 g.)
Important Australian women artists, Melbourne Fine Art Gallery, 10 June-21 July 1993

Myra Scott, 'Dora Meeson', in Lara Smith (ed.), Important Australian women artists, Melbourne: Melbourne Fine Art Gallery, cover (illus.), pp. 22 (illus.), 23
Terry Ingram, 'Meeson art hits the big time after four decades', Australian Financial Review, 3 June 1993, p. 41 (illus.)

Fine 19th century English and continental pictures and watercolours, Bonham's Knightsbridge, 26 November 1992, lot 251
Neville Healy, Melbourne
Melbourne Fine Art Gallery, Melbourne
Purchased from the above in 1993

Although born in Melbourne, Dora Meeson moved with her family to London as a child, and commenced her art studies at the Slade School. In 1895 she returned to the antipodes and spent two years at Melbourne's National Gallery School, where she met her future husband, George Coates, before returning again to Europe just as Coates won the Travelling Scholarship. The couple studied together at the Académie Julian and exhibited in Paris before settling in London in 1900 and marrying three years later. The Coateses were part of that substantial coterie of Australian painters living and working in London and Paris in the years immediately before the Great War, a group which included such artists as Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and A.H. Fullwood, Rupert Bunny, George Lambert, John Longstaff, Emanuel Phillips Fox and Ethel Carrick, Will Dyson, James Quinn and Thea Proctor.

While George's métier was careful, sober, tonally-constructed Roberts-Longstaff portraits, Dora was much more expansive in a Fox and Bunny way, readily admitting her enthusiasm for Monet's 'brilliant light and colour'υ1 and most often painting her own Thames River landscapes en plein air. The present work exemplifies Meeson's ebullient style and character. As Myra Scott describes it, 'the palette is of softly feminine colours of pastel blues, greens, yellows and tomato red, the scene suggestive of the leisured lifestyle of gentlewomen in the Edwardian period such as she had lived in the parental home. The resting women in flowing draperies and softly muted pastels create an evocative mood of ennui during a langorous siesta, while the dominating high-keyed tomato-reds and multiplicity of small brushstrokes suggesting a light-filled milieu are consistent with Meeson's wish to "express light and colour."'υ2

On a Chelsea balcony was one of the pictures Meeson brought back to Australia for exhibition in Melbourne in 1913. While the Argus review of the Athenaeum focussed much of its attention on her husband's work, it acknowledged that 'Mrs Coates is also seen to every advantage in some realistic scenes treated broadly and with fine sense of colour...'υ3 That broad brushwork and fearless palette are very much in evidence in the present work, which is probably the artist's best-known and most highly-regarded painting.

We are most grateful to Myra Scott for her assistance in cataloguing this work.

1. Dora Meeson, quoted in Jim Alexander, Dora Meeson (1869-1955) and George Coates (1869-1930) (exhibition catalogue), Melbourne: Jim Alexander Gallery, 1984, p. 3
2. Myra Scott, 'Dora Meeson', in Lara Smith (ed.), Important Australian women artists (exhibition catalogue), Melbourne: Melbourne Fine Art Gallery, p. 23
3. Argus, 8 July 1913, p. 8