Jean Appleton was born in Sydney, Australia in 1911 and studied at East Sydney Technical College in 1928. In 1935 she moved to England and enrolled at London`s Westminster School of Art, where she attended classes under the tutelage of Bernard Meninsky, Mark Gertler and Blair Hughes-Stanton. At the outbreak of the Second World War she reluctantly returned to Australia, where she she taught at the Julian Ashton School of Art and The National Art School, while her artwork, which she regularly exhibited, continued to receive much recognition; she made a brief but unsatisfactory return to England in the late 1960s.
Painter Jean Appleton was born in Sydney, Australia in 1911. She enrolled in the five year Art Diploma of Drawing and Illustration Course at East Sydney Technical College in 1928, where her main lecturers were Douglas Dundas and Fred Britton. After seeing an exhibition of post-impressionist prints she became obsessed with the idea of travelling to Europe to discover more about modernist art, but her father was against it. She had several attempts at the New South Wales Government Travelling Scholarship but was unsuccessful. Meanwhile, she shared a studio with artist Dorothy Thornhill and worked on textile designs.
In 1935 her father died and her mother, persuaded by Appleton's aunt Agnes, who had always encouraged her artistic inclinations, agreed to her going to England, also offering her a small allowance of three pounds a week for two years to enable her to survive in London. In the English capital Appleton found cheap lodgings and enrolled at Westminster School of Art, ‘quite the most alive and exciting school at that time’, as she later recalled (Joanna Gilmour, National Portrait Gallery of Canberra website). Appleton’s three years at the school proved to be extremely important in shaping her new approach to art. She attended both day and evening classes under the tutelage of Bernard Meninsky and Mark Gertler, who were both closely associated the Anglo-Jewish artistic cohort known as the Whitechapel Boys, while Gertler had close links with the literary and artistic Bloomsbury Group. She also took classes from wood engraver Blair Hughes-Stanton. Fellow Australians who studied with Appleton included Donald Friend, William Dobell, Arthur Murch, and Eric Wilson, the latter whom she would marry in 1943. While at the school, she completed two works considered Australia's earliest cubist paintings, Still Life and Painting IX (both 1937). In between study and work, when she had the money, Appleton travelled, in particular to Paris. ‘I was able to see things that I could never have dreamed about before then’, she later said (Joanna Gilmour, National Portrait Gallery of Canberra website). After seeing Aristide Maillol’s The Cyclist in Paris during her first summer holiday, she was inspired to try her hand at sculpture. When she returned to London she took lessons from sculptor Eric Schilsky for four months. Briefly, she was so fascinated by sculpture that she thought she might devote herself solely to this medium, but eventually realised that she could not renounce to the power of colour that so characterised her painting. Beyond painting, Appleton was part of the team of artists which made a 45-metre felt mural and a huge gilded ram intended to surmount the International Wool Secretariat exhibit at Glasgow's British Empire Exhibition in 1938.
With war looming, Appleton’s mother was anxious that she return home. Distressed at having to leave the Westminster School and London, Appleton decided to give herself a farewell present. She spent the money earned from the wool venture on a trip to Paris to see the Centenary Cezanne exhibition, then travelled to Italy, before returning to Australia. Teaching was one of the few ways for an artist to survive during wartime, and in 1940 she began to teach at the Church of England Girls Grammar School in Canberra, and then, as part of the war effort, with the Occupational Therapy Training Centre in Sydney. In the same year she held her first solo exhibition at the Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, beginning a 38-year association. In 1943 she was elected a member of The Society of Artists and she also contributed to the Contemporary Art Group. The same year she married Eric Wilson, who died of cancer only three years later. Appleton felt that she had `lost her way’ in the decade between 1940 and 1950, attributing this to leaving England when she did not wish to, hearing of both Gertler's and Meninsky's suicides, and the death of her husband (Australian Art Gallery website). Following this 'lost' period, she took over her late husband's teaching at the Julian Ashton Art School and, in 1947, also began teaching at East Sydney Technical College. Over the years her work received much public recognition, and she exhibited and won prizes. However, despite this success, by the late 1960s she felt a need to recharge and to re-evaluate her painting, so Appleton decided to return to England with her second husband. Unfortunately, it was a time of enormous social change and student unrest; some art schools were closed to staff, others were experiencing severe disruption. These difficulties and a feeling of alienation from the prevailing art styles of the 1960s persuaded the couple to return to Australia and settle at Moss Vale. Appleton remained active until her death: she exhibited, painted and became interested in printmaking, concentrating in particular on screenprints. Jean Appleton died at Moss Vale, Australia in 2003. Currently there are no public collections in the UK holding her work.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Jean Appleton]
Publications related to [Jean Appleton] in the Ben Uri Library