JOSEPHINE MUNTZ ADAMS (1862-1949), THE NEEDLEWORKER

• Lot Sold $9,700 (Hammer Price)
• $11,640 (Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium)

oil on canvas board
signed 'Munts Adams' lower right
34.5 BY 24.5CM

Josephine Muntz Adams trained under George Folingsby at the National Gallery School during the 1880s before travelling to Paris and London for further study: she exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1892 and won the gold medal for portraiture at the Greater Britain Exhibition of 1899. Returning to Australia, she established a successful practice as a portrait painter in Brisbane and Melbourne in the 1910s and 1920s, and was also professionally active both as a teacher and as a committee member of the Victorian Artists' Society.
Juliet Peers has noted that (as in the work of May Vale, Agnes Goodsir and Bessie Gibson) Muntz Adms' 'female subjects were always non-professional models, in many cases relatives and friends, usually posed reading or sewing to help keep them still and amused while sitting.'(1) In the present work, while the subject may be still, the picture surface is, typically, anything but. Within a fundamentally naturalistic conception, the brushwork is dynamic and expressive, its rapid touches, heavy impasto and broken, optically-mixed colour giving the work something of a Venetian flavour.
(1) Juliet Peers, 'Josephine Muntz Adams', in Joan Kerr (ed.), Heritage: The National Women's Art Book, G+B Arts International Ltd, 1995, p. 68