Women Artists early 20th Century Australia
Mary Meyer - biographical notes
This is a research page that will be updated as information comes to hand
We are looking for a photo of Mary Meyer and any information on the location of more of her paintings.
There's link at the bottom of this page to those works we know about.
This post has relied on several published books and other sources. We appreciate any corrections and any updates.
last updated 21 November 2024.
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Self-Portrait
Painted by Mary Fisher Nanson
(Mary Meyer from 1904)
born Melbourne 1878, died Melbourne 1975
The work is dated circa 1898
Collection National Gallery of Australia, part of the 1976 bequest of Mary Meyer to the national collection. |
Mary Fisher Nanson was born in 1878 in Melbourne.
Mary married Professor (Medical Doctor) Felix Meyer in 1904 (who was born in 1858).
Felix Meyer died 1937.
Mary Meyer died 1975 in Melbourne aged 97.
Mary is listed as artist/ painter, arts patron and collector.
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E. Phillip Fox
Portrait of Mary, daughter of Professor Nanson, dated circa 1898
NGV: National Gallery of Victoria
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A biography of the life and works of Mary Meyer
An Introduction
Mary Fisher Nanson was born in 1878 in Melbourne. She was the second daughter of Edward Nanson, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Melbourne. It is more likely that at least her first years were spent in a residence provided on the campus.
Mary studied at the Melbourne School of Art from 1896 to 1900, taking classes taught by E. Phillips Fox and Tudor St George Tucker. Mary attended the summer school at Charterisville. This was Australia's first recognised summer school of art.
Juliette Peers in Past Present (reference below) says that Mary did not study at the National Gallery School in Melbourne but in c1902 she spent time at the Westminster School of Art London.
About Charterisville (see also link below)
From 1890 until 1893, Walter Withers rented the run-down homestead, Charterisville, where he had a studio, and sublet one-roomed cottages to other artists. Charterisville was situated on rising land above the Yarra in East Ivanhoe. In 1890, Leon Pole joined Withers there and remained for several years. Between 1893 and 1901, E. Phillips Fox ran the Melbourne School of Art with fellow painter Tudor St George Tucker. Fox had taken over the lease in 1894.
The students lived in part of the stone house and had a chaperon, a housekeeper looking after their wants. They used colour boldly, adopting a ‘broken brush’ technique that employed a round brush, in the manner of the French Impressionists. Attendees included Ina Gregory, Mary Meyer and Helen Peters. Violet Teague was also there possibly as a tutor.
Mary married Professor Felix Meyer in 1904 (who was born in 1858 – so was 20 years older than Mary). In the 1920s and 1930s, Mary Meyer shared a studio in Collins Street with Ada Plante and Isabel Hunter Tweddle.
Meyer was an active member of Melbourne art circles and exhibited at the Lyceum Club Melbourne. Mary painted throughout her life, specialising in small, Impressionist landscapes influenced by her time at Charterisville.
Mary and Felix were long-time patrons of the arts and bought works from their contemporaries. Mary formed lifelong friendships with members of the Heidelberg School. The Home magazine reported on 1st November 1927 that Doctor and Mrs Felix Meyer were travelling through England and Scotland and then onto Europe.
Mary's father died in 1936 (He was 86 with Mary now 58). Felix died in one year later in 1937 (Felix being 79 with Mary 59).
In 1965 Mary held a retrospective exhibition at the Melbourne's Lyceum Club of which she was an original member.
Mary Meyer died 1975 in Melbourne, aged 97. Her will was complicated, with monetary bequests to several people and institutions, and collected works being bequeathed in her husband's name to public collections.
On her death, the estate included two properties and monies of about $874,000. She bequeathed the University of Melbourne $130,000 to endow postgraduate scholarships in the name of her husband, Dr Felix Meyer. She also bequeathed a number of works from her collection to the National Gallery of Australia and to the National Gallery of Victoria. Some of her own paintings were distributed to several Victorian regional galleries in 1976.
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E. Phillip Fox
Portrait of Mary Nanson, dated late 1890s,
Drawing, National Gallery of Australia |
More About Mary Meyer
A lot of research on early 19th century Australian women artists has been undertaken by researcher/ historians such as Juliette Peers (see links below).
From what we have learnt so far, there is no biography on Mary Meyer and there is a lot unknown about her career as an artist. While she attended Charterisville (in Ivanhoe, Melbourne) for a few years, there must have been works produced before this. The self-portrait (NGA) indicates that she was painting in a style that was to change once she attended Charterisville. Where else did she learn to paint?
Juliette Peers in her book More Than Just Gum Trees (reference below), writes that Mary exhibited once with the Victorian Artists' Society and later with war time funding exhibition organised by Violet Teague.
Juliette Peers also writes that while Mary Meyer was a prolific artist, she did not exhibit works as would be expected of someone hoping to make a career of being an artist. Juliette Peers mentions that someone who knew her, Lina Bryan, spoke of Mary as a sensitive and talented artist with little interest in sales.
Speculation is that that after she married, she became a wealthy woman and therefore selling works may have not been necessary. But none of this took away from her interest in other artists and her commitment to painting all her life in a style faithful to the Charterisville school vision.
In Past Present, Juliette Peers writes that:
Mary was rather rather prickly towards some classical modernists at the Lyceum Club in the early 1960s who assumed she was an 'amateur' painter. (based on a conversation in 1992 that Juliet Peers had with Dr John Downes).
Art collecting and the production of a prolific oeuvre of small plein-air works (and copies after the admired Arthur Streeton) possibly compensated her for a degree of social ostracism. Her marriage to a Jewish man some years her senior having caused some consternation. Apparently she became estranged from her family.
Jewishness could still have a certain social stigma at the time of her inter-faith marriage, a generation before Jewish radicals became to a great degree the conscience and leaders of Melbourne cultural life.
The question remains that as she was prolific for seventy years or maybe even more, where are the works now? The best we know is of the low number of works that continue to come up for auction and the few scattered around public collections. When writing this, we have identified 26 works.
There is a report that after her death a tea-chest was delivered to the National Gallery of Victoria that contained framed and unframed works to go out to public collections. We do not know how many there were in that tea-chest.
A few of these have been tracked and there are reports that some were sent out for auction. But with the word 'prolific' being used to describe how she worked, that leaves a lot of works unaccounted for.
In her will there is no mention of her own artworks - and nothing to say how many there were or what happened to them. Did she destroy some or many in her later years?
Another factor that complicates tracking works after her death is her immediate and extended families. Her mother had died in 1904 (Mary being 26). At that time there were five children, herself, four sisters and one brother.
Her father, Professor Nanson, married again in 1913 (Mary being 35) and had a further four daughters. In total Mary's father Professor Nanson had nine children.
When Mary died in 1975, she was 97. Felix and Mary had no children - so there was no direct descendant to inherit their wealth when Mary died. We know little about the extended families.
As noted in her will, several people to whom she had hoped to leave monies to had already died.
We do not know if members of her immediate family or their descendants had paintings by Mary Meyer.
According to her estate managers, when Mary died, the house she lived in was not in a well-maintained state. We have looked up the property and it has been replaced with a 1970's style house. It is most likely the original house was demolished not too long after her death to be replaced with a modern house.
There must be more works out there somewhere. We will be watching the auctions for more.
The research continues...
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Rupert Bunny
Portrait of Mary Meyer, dated 1911
National Gallery of Australia |
The copyright for Mary Meyer may still be with her relatives/ her estate.
We cannot supply images nor give permission for their use.
The images produced here have been uploaded for research and education reasons.
We are keen to let people know about Australian early 20th century woman artists, such as Mary Meyer.
Hopefully others will also research Mary Meyer and her artworks and publish new information on her.
A note about Charterisville:
While the original farm and surrounding lands were attractive for painting and for the camps in the late 19th century, there is nothing so romantic about the house and site today. The house is just another suburban house - much altered and located on a suburban block in a well developed suburban area - with the road out front a very busy arterial road.
Researching the Melbourne University link:
One of the possible sources of information we followed was a note on the university site that they held the personal papers and photographs relating to correspondence between Mary and her father, Professor Hanson. The files contain information about Professor Hanson but nothing about Mary. There are a couple of albums of photographs but the photographs are unnamed – it is not possible to know who is in the photographs. Our speculation is that they are photographs Professor Nanson’s family rather than any of Mary and Felix.
Later we saw correspondence that at the time of receiving the Mary Meyer bequests in 1976 the National Gallery of Australia had also researched what the university had been given. They also noted that personal papers were missing. Also missing is anything relating to exhibitions or records of mention of Mary Meyer’s own artworks.
We can only speculate as to what happened to documentation relating to Mary Meyer’s artworks, her activities with other artists and the few exhibitions she participated in.
For a selection of Mary Meyer's paintings - click here
Links
Wikipedia entry on Charterisville
Entry on her father, Professor Edward John Nanson (1850–1936).
Entry on Professor Felix Meyer (1858–1937)
An entry on Dr Felix Meyer's medical practice history
2024 Wikipedia entry on Mary Meyer
Books we have used as source material include:
Past Present: The National Women's Art Anthology. 1999 Edited by Joan Kerr and Jo Holder. With particular reference to the article by Juliette Peers: Place aux dames: Women Artists and Historical Memory.
Completing the Picture: Women Artists and the Heidelberg Era, 1992, Victoria Hammond and Juliette Peers.
More Than Just Gumtrees: A personal, Social and Artistic History of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors, Juliette Peers 1993.
The Artists Camps, Helen Topliss, 1992.
Australian Impressionists in France, NGV, Elena Taylor 2013.