Description:

Margery Pitt Withers
(1890/94-1966)
Portrait of a Young Man
Watercolour
Signed lower right
25 x 15 cm, 41 x 29.5 cm overall

LITERATURE:
Margery Withers was the daughter of artist Walter Withers. She was born in England after her mother had returned there to nurse her Father brought to Australia as a baby by her mother, Fanny Flinn, when she returned to Australia from England to join her husband, Walter Withers, in 1890. Margery studied at the National Gallery School, Melbourne & at the Working Men's College. She became a painter & teacher, her work is held in several public collections.
Her career along with various children of late Nineteenth century Melbourne artists such as Vasco Loureriro, Archibald & Elizabeth Colquhoun, Louis & Sheila McCubbin, Esther Paterson, Penleigh, Merric & Helen Boyd gravitated toward the National Gallery School, they met & re met others in group exhibitions, artists' societies & artists' functions.....having spent much of their childhood in each others company.
However despite an artistic childhood & encouragement to become artists, the Second Generation of "Heidelberg Women" received little recognition, despite their celebrated forebears, the allure of their family names did not give them a secure footing with later generations, with the exception of Margery Withers, who never joined the MSWPS, (who) tended towards modernist expression or favoured commercial art. Often this second generation of women cannot be typecast neatly into the stereotypes of Heidelberg traditions as could the landscape based work of Louis McCubbin & Margery Withers & her siblings" p68.
"There were a number of married couples who both painted professionally in the Meldrum group, AD & Amalie Colquhoun, being the best known, but also John Farmer & Polly Hurry & Richard McCann & Margery Withers. Peers, Juliet. More Than Just Gum Trees: A Personal, Social & Artistic History of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters & Sculptors, MSWPS inconjunction with Dawn Rivival Press, Melbourne 1993 p28, 68,74
Note: Biographical information at http://www.artistsfootsteps.com/html/Withers_Bio.htm states Margery Wither's birth date as 13 January, 1890.
https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/216168281

She died in 1966. Margery was married to artist Richard McCann who donated a work to the State Library of Victoria after her death.


OTHER NOTES:
Condition:
Some fading, slight foxing upper edges, original framing

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