painter and printmaker, was born on 11 July 1890 at South Yarra, Melbourne, second of the six children of William George Lucas Spowers, part-owner of the Argus newspaper, and Annie Christina, daughter of the Victorian historian William Westgarth. The family lived very comfortably at Toorak and Ethel was educated at the Church of England Girls’ Grammar School, Melboure, where she was a prefect in 1908. Ethel briefly studied at the Académie Delécluse while living in Paris with her family (c.1910), then did the full course in drawing and painting at Melbourne’s National Gallery School (1911-17); her contemporaries included Christian Waller (then Yandell), Mary Cecil Allen, Napier Waller and Mabel Pye. In 1920 she held a solo exhibition at the Decoration Galleries in Collins Street; chiefly pictures of fairies influenced by the art of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite.

Ethel went overseas with her family again in 1921 and studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic, London, and at the Académie Rauson, Paris. That year she held an exhibition with the Australian artist Mary Reynolds at the Macrae Gallery, London. When the rest of the family returned home, Ethel and her older sister, Elison, travelled throughout Europe.

After returning to Melbourne in 1924, she exhibited with the Victorian Artists’ Society and at the New Gallery, Elizabeth Street (in 1925). Two solo shows at the New Gallery, Melbourne (1925 and 1927) confirmed her reputation as an illustrator of fairy tales, although by then she was also producing woodcuts and linocuts inspired by Japanese art. The variety of work she produced before 1928 included illustrations for books like Furnley Maurice’s Arrows of Longing (Melbourne 1921). However, when she attended the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London, her style and medium were transformed by the principles and modernist linocut prints of Claude Flight, who taught printmaking at the school. Her close friend Eveline Syme joined her there. Ethel returned for further study at the Grosvenor School under Iain Macnab in 1931.

Spowers exhibited linocuts with Dorrit Black, Nutter Buzzacott, James Flett, Eric Thake and Frederick Ward in 1930 at Everyman’s Library, Melbourne. She had two more solo exhibitions at Sydney’s Grosvenor Galleries in 1932 and 1936. In 1936 she travelled to Colombo and Japan with Dorothy Noall, another founding member (1932) with Spowers and Syme of George Bell’s Contemporary Group, Melbourne. Spowers was a member of the Victorian Artists’ Society from 1916 and was actively involved in the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria from its inception. Her major linocuts were made between 1928 and 1935; due to increasing illness she stopped making prints towards the end of the decade. She died of cancer on 5 May 1947 in East Melbourne and was buried with Anglican rites in Fawkner Cemetery. Although she destroyed many of her paintings in a bonfire, a memorial exhibition of her watercolours and prints was held at Melbourne’s St George’s Gallery in 1948.

Roger Butler believes that the two nudes in one of Spowers’s best known colour linocuts, Resting Models (1934, NGA), are almost certainly her and Syme, as possibly are the figures in Thea Proctor’s woodcut Women with Fans (1930, NGA). With Syme, she was an enthusiastic worker for the Red Cross, for which she produced the linocut, The Junior Red Cross Works in Every Land (1941, ML), as the cover of the Australian Red Cross Society’s The Story of the Red Cross (n.d.). Her popular linocuts are held in most major Australian public collections.

[JOAN KERR ADDITION:] Spowers mostly did 'high art’ colour linocuts and woodcuts (NGA has 44 prints). Linocut bookplate for Everyman’s Lending Library, 332 Collins Street, Melbourne (n.d.) ill. The Age of Ex Libris: Bookplates from the Library’s Collection , Baillieu Library MU 1996, n.p. An exhibition of modern prints was held at the Library in 1930 in which Spowers showed some woodcuts. In May 2000 Deutscher-Menzies was auctioning two original watercolour, pencil and pen and ink illustrations for Cuthbert and the Dogs , one annotated (CAPS) 'And you need not tell me all those lies, for cats and dogs do not eat pies -/ your naughtiness just makes me sick” and she hit him with his little stick’ (ill. col. cat. 189). The other (not ill.) was said to be annotated (CAPS): 'Mother was scarecely [sic] out of sight, when in they rushed from left and right/ Cuthbert had only just begun to try one cake when he heard them come’ [but surely should rhyme]. A folio of 20 drawings for Silly Peggy was also offered (cat.190), along with 20 drawings including Careless Kate (cat.191) and 17 drawings for The Little Red Purse (cat.192). All look like straight children’s book illustrations, although the first pair have a comical element apparently lacking in the others (3 only illustrated).

Writers:

Kerr, Joan Note: Heritage biography.

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

1992