Wikipedia:Today's featured article/August 2, 2014

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Pen portrait of Florence Fuller, 1897

Florence Fuller (1867–1946) was a South African-born Australian artist. Originally from Port Elizabeth, Fuller migrated as a child to Melbourne with her family. There she trained with her uncle Robert Hawker Dowling and teacher Jane Sutherland and took classes at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, becoming a professional artist in the late 1880s. In 1892 she left Australia, travelling first to South Africa, where she met and painted for Cecil Rhodes, and then on to Europe. Between 1895 and 1904 her works were exhibited at the Paris Salon and London's Royal Academy. In 1904, Fuller returned to Australia to live in Perth. She became active in the Theosophical Society and painted some of her best-known works. From 1908, Fuller travelled extensively, living in India and England before ultimately settling in Sydney where she was the inaugural teacher of life drawing at a women's art school. Highly regarded in her lifetime as a portrait and landscape painter, by 1914 Fuller was represented in four public galleries—three in Australia and one in South Africa—a record for an Australian female painter at that time. She subsequently suffered mental illness and sank into obscurity. (Full article...)

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