Jean Sutherland was born in in Victoria, Australia in 1902, studying at Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria Art School. After moving to England, she enrolled at London's Royal Academy Schools and Slade School of Fine Art. A versatile artist, she also produced decorative stencil work, ceramics and printmaking, and exhibited twice at the Royal Academy. Returning to Australia, she continued to paint and occasionally exhibited her work, although she failed to achieve wider recognition as an artist.
Painter Jean Sutherland was born in in Victoria, Australia on 6 June 1902. From 1918 she studied at Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria Art School, winning the prestigious Travelling Scholarship in 1923, which enabled her to travel to Europe with her aunt Jean Goodlet Sutherland, a painter and sculptor who was awarded second prize for sculpture at the 1907 Women's Work Exhibition and had given her niece her first art lessons.
Arriving in London in 1924, Sutherland enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools, studying figure drawing and portraiture in oils. In September 1925, she travelled to Brittany, resuming her studies at the RAS in 1926. A versatile artist, she also took a correspondence course in black-and-white decorative art, as she was keen on photography, decorative stencil work, ceramics and printmaking, all of those skills she improved in London. In spring 1926 her portrait of Miss Erskine, now held by the National Gallery of Victoria, was exhibited at the Royal Academy; the following year she contributed a still-life. After her scholarship ended, she spent an extra year in London at the Slade School of Fine Art under professor Henry Tonks and some time in the studio of still-life painter Beatrice Bland. Sutherland also wrote reviews of art seen in Paris in 1926 as a casual correspondent for Melbourne newspapers. One of her paintings was included in the Rome Scholarship exhibition at the British School, Rome and she visited Italy.
Upon her return to Victoria in 1927, Sutherland joined the Victorian Artists' Society. She sent four paintings to their 1928 exhibition, but none sold and she never exhibited with the Society again. In the same year she became engaged to the painter Ernest Buckmaster, whom she had known since her student days, but the engagement was broken off before Buckmaster left for London in 1929; Sutherland never married. She led a quiet life on small private income in her family home in Gardenvale. She spent many weekends painting at her cottage in the Dandenongs mountains, until it was destroyed in a fire in 1933. Painter Ethel Carrick Fox, who stayed with Sutherland at Gardenvale in 1937, encouraged her to take a renewed interest in the local art scene. She subsequently joined the Melbourne Society of Women Painters in 1940 and met painter and official war artist Sybil Craig, who became her closest friend. She exhibited with the Women Painters until the early 1950s. In October 1944 she held her only solo exhibition, at Melbourne’s Sedon Galleries, but again only a few pictures were sold. Sutherland produced watercolours, oils and pastels, her subjects including European and Australian landscapes, still lifes, flowers, portraits, nudes and interiors. Jean Sutherland died in Melbourne, Australia in 1978. Her work is not currently represented in UK public collections
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Jean Sutherland]
Publications related to [Jean Sutherland] in the Ben Uri Library