Grace Joel was born to English-Jewish parents in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1865. She studied at the National Gallery School in Melbourne, Australia, then briefly in Paris, before moving permanently to England at the turn of the twentieth century. She settled in London, where she was part of a wide circle of expatriate Australian and New Zealand artists, and exhibited at the Royal Academy, Scottish Academy and the Salon in Paris.
Painter Grace Joel was born into a Jewish family in 1865 in Dunedin, New Zealand, the eldest daughter and sixth of the nine children of English parents, Kate (née Woolf) and Maurice Joel, prominent and cultivated members of Dunedin's Jewish community, who were highly sympathetic to the arts. Joel grew up in an environment which placed a high value on education, including education for women, and attended Otago Girls' High School from 1875–82, before joining the Otago Art Society at the age of 21; she later studied at the National Gallery School in Melbourne, Australia. After returning to Dunedin in mid-1894, she determined to establish herself as a professional artist, becoming a founder member in 1895 of the Easel Club (Dunedin's equivalent to Christchurch's breakaway Palette Club) and was associated with Italian artist Girolamo Nerli, who had a local art school, and may have influenced her decision to focus on figures and portraits and in developing her feeling for rich colour.
In 1898 Joel left for Paris, where she studied under Marcel-André Baschet (1862–1941) and François Schommer (1850–1935), at the celebrated Académie Julian (a major alternative to the official Ecole des Beaux Arts, particularly for women who had only been admitted to the Beaux Arts in 1897), furthering her interest in figure painting. She moved to London in around 1899 where she was to settle permanently following a brief return to New Zealand in 1906. In England, she had close connections with expatriate Australian and New Zealand artists, and exhibited figure compositions and street scenes at the Royal Academy, the Scottish Academy, and the Salon in Paris. She was also a member of the Society of Women Artists and the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists. Her circle included the painters Margaret Stoddart (1865–1934) and Frances Hodgkins (1869–1947). At a time when landscape was considered dominant in painting, Joel's focus on the human figure and on portraits in particular was pioneering. Her portraits showed a deep engagement with her subject and sought to capture the essence of the individual. She also made a profound study of the relationship between mother and child and portraits of women, in which she communicated a sense of stillness and dignity. Her flower subjects, landscapes, and townscapes were sometimes referred to as 'Whistlerian' and her feeling for rich colour, present from her earliest paintings, remained a signature component of her style. In 1922 she wrote to British painter George Clausen, explaining how, while she was studying art in Melbourne, she had been taught to look reverently at his works and had aspired to paint figures out of doors, as he did. She added that she intended to send a work to the Royal Academy that year, and hearing that he was on the jury, she hoped he would like it, just as George Frederic Watts did.
Despite her assiduity and professional commitment, Joel never established a solid critical reputation within the more conservative wings of the British and French art world where she aspired to make her mark. The progressive, mildly avant-garde position she held within New Zealand painting in the 1890s was soon diluted by the introduction of later modernist movements including Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and the move towards Abstraction. That she chose to live and work in Europe, rather than taking the easier option of staying in Dunedin, reflects the new ambition of artists who, having come into contact with international painters, such as Nerli, saw beyond the local landscape. She died of cancer in Kensington, London, on 6 March 1924. In her will, she showed her concern for younger painters by leaving a sum of money to establish a student prize for painting from the nude at the National Gallery of Victoria School in Melbourne. Unlike her compatriot Frances Hodgkins, who wrote over 1,000 letters, Joel left no personal papers of significance and this lack of primary information has partly contributed to her relative obscurity. She is not represented in UK public collections although her work is well represented in New Zealand.