Janet Cumbrae-Stewart


Janet Agnes Cumbrae Stewart was an Australian painter. She spent the 1920s and 1930s painting in Britain, France and Italy. She was a member of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors.

Biography

Cumbrae-Stewart was born in Melbourne, Australia on 23 December 1883. Her birth name was Janet Agnes Cumbrae Stewart. She added the hyphen Cumbrae-Stewart in the early 1900s and then dispensed with the hyphen to sign her work.
From 1901 though 1907 Cumbrae-Stewart studied at the Melbourne National Gallery School, where she was taught by Lindsay Bernard Hall and Frederick McCubbin. From 1909 through 1919 she exhibited with the Victorian Artists Society. In 1922 she left Australia and spent the next decades painting and exhibiting in Europe.
She returned to Australia in 1939.
Cumbrae-Stewart died 8 September 1960 in Melbourne.

Legacy

In 2003 the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery held a retrospective of Cumbrae-Stewart's work entitled The Perfect Touch.
In 2017-2018 Cumbrae-Stewart was included in the Australian National Trust show Intrepid Women – Australian women artists in Paris 1900-1950.