painter, mural painter, modeller, puppet-maker, theatre and diorama artist, was born in Kangaroo Point, Brisbane, daughter of Major D.R. Harris DSM and his wife, Bertha, of the pioneering pastoral Collins family. Clothilde was raised on the family property, Eurara, at Beaudesert. She studied art at the Brisbane Central Technical College under L.J. Harvey and Martyn Collins in the early 1930s, then worked in Sydney for a time. There she met, and in 1940 married, Lieutenant Michael Highton RN. He was posted missing after the sinking of HMAS Perth in 1942; she was officially informed of his death in 1946. Soon afterwards, Clothilde and their daughter, Caryl, left for London. There Highton met and studied painting with the Australian artist Will Longstaff. Longstaff was making dioramas for Australia House, London, and after seeing Highton’s large religious figures encouraged her to make dioramas too. In three months she had made and sold her first diorama to the Mowbray Gallery. Her Castles and Carriages toured provincial England and was shown in London. She produced scenery and costumes for operettas, murals, displays and puppet theatres. The major work she undertook in England was a larger than life size Crucifix with subsidiary figures of Mary and Joseph for the chapel of Arundel Castle. It was included in the religious art section of the 1951 Festival of Britain, resulting in her being elected a member of the Guild of Memorial Craftsmen of Great Britain that year (membership was restricted to fifty, five of whom were women).

Highton exhibited Coronations through the Ages when she returned to Brisbane in 1953, then toured it to other state capitals. As a result of its popular appeal she was commissioned by Qantas to produce Fifty Years of Flight , shown in Farmers Gallery at Sydney and Georges Gallery, Melbourne. Australia’s Links with the Crown , consisting of ten dioramas, was executed for the 1954 Royal Tour; Fashion Fads and Fancies , twenty-four dioramas depicting ’2,000 years of fashion’, was shown at Ball & Welchs, Melbourne, and at Anthony Horderns, Sydney in 1955. She turned her hand to the production of other theatrical enterprises, including puppets for the Queensland Road Safety Police in 1959 and the Spastic Children’s Centre in 1960. She designed many displays for firms in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, as well as exhibits for the Queensland Industries Fairs from 1955. But the advent of television in Australia largely destroyed the popular appeal of dioramas and she stopped producing them.

Highton cared for her widowed father and, later, remarried and moved to Ormiston. Between 1947 and 1963 she had occasionally exhibited paintings with the Royal Queensland Art Society and from 1964 exhibited with the Yurara Art Group, of which she was a founding member (it merged with the Royal Queensland Art Society in 1983). Her paintings were also hung in the Redcliffe Art Prize competition in the 1960s. Finally, she retired to a farm at Boonah and raised Arabian horses.

Writers:

Cooke, Glenn R.

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

2011