painting

According to the writing on the photo, the artist's name is Vida Lahey.

Frances Vida Lahey (1882-1968), a painter, was born on 26 August 1882 at Pimpama, Queensland, daughter of David Lahey, Irish-born farmer and timber-miller, and his wife, Jane Jemima, née Walmsley. She began to exhibit regularly in all major Australian cities in 1923 and subsequently participated in exhibitions in Paris, London and the United States of America. Her early subjects included genre, landscape and portraits but still, life, especially floral pieces in watercolour, became predominant. Most successful in watercolour, she believed that her still life work had developed its uses in a new way. By the mid-1920s she had won a firm place among Australian women artists and she was well regarded for her vivacious and sensitive treatment of light and colour. Her pamphlet, Art for All (c.1946), made an urgent plea to combat the ugliness and monotony of the modern world through imagination and a pleasing environment. Short, slight and very shy, Vida Lahey believed strongly in the dignity of labour and herself laid much of the brickwork around her St Lucia home, designed by her brother Romeo. Vida Lahey was a sensitive and pleasing painter but her main contribution lies in her role as teacher and public spokeswoman in a State not noted for its interest in culture. Source: adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lahey-frances-vida-7008

Beautiful painting!

Thanks for adding to NPI. Very evocative.

ESTELLE THOMSON. A versatile little lady is Mrs. Estelle Thomson, the author of a charming booklet on Australian wild flowers. Living in happy domesticity in her home on the Eight Mile Plains, she is within easy reach of her beloved bush and its rich harvest of shrub and vine and flower. Mrs. Thomson chose her parents well, inheriting from one her love of nature, and from the other artistry that with a deft touch of pencil and brush can make form and colour the medium of her beauty. At the beginning of the year, Mrs. Thomson was elected as President of the Queensland Naturalist Club, an honour that has only been accorded to one other woman in this State. Botanists, of course, have named and labelled all our Queensland flowers. Mrs. Thomson is interested in an attempt being made to add fanciful descriptive names to many of these flowers—names that the children growing up will remember and love. Not content with helping her own three young Queenslanders to study nature, she has visited a country school week-in and week-out to teach the students there something of the joy and loveliness he found in bushland. A fitting title for her is surely this: "The little lady of the flowers." FLAME. Source: trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/182842542# The Week, 27, May 1931