painter and poet, was the fourth daughter in the Huntley family of ten children; Isabel Huntley was a niece. Miriam grew up in the family home at Huntley’s Point on the Parramatta River, Sydney and learnt to paint at an early age. Her love of painting continued throughout her life and she worked constantly as an artist over a fifty-year period. She began her art training at the Royal Art Society School under Dattilo Rubbo, whose fine portrait she painted in 1909. Titled The Man with the Red Tie , it shows her strong drawing skills at the age of twenty-four and the influence of Post-Impressionism introduced by her teacher. Now in the Manly Art Gallery (a gift of the artist in 1968), the painting was exhibited, along with two other portraits signed 'Miriam Huntley’, with the Royal Art Society in 1909. She also showed other work with the Society.

During her first brief marriage, Miriam continued her art training at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School. Her second marriage was to a dentist, Leslie John Moxham, whose portrait she painted (exhibited 1937: unlocated). The Moxhams lived for the rest of their lives in a house at Roseville on Sydney’s North Shore; they had no children. Miriam worked in a studio at home where she also pursued her two other great loves – writing and gardening. Occasionally, she visited relatives in the leafy outskirts of northern Sydney, where she also painted, but she had no desire to travel overseas. She was friendly with Edmund Harvey, Beryl Young and Arthur Murch and visited Thirroul on the South Coast to participate in sketching camps held by Murch.

Miriam’s other talent was poetry. In 1927-28 she contributed many poems to Undergrowth , the Sydney Art School’s Student Club magazine, all illustrated with her own linocuts and woodcuts. An illustrated book of her poems was published by Shakespeare Head Press in 1936. Strongly autobiographical, they deal with early twentieth century themes of alienation and despair that are seldom reflected in her paintings. Miriam’s life-long quest for spiritual fulfilment, in which painting played a major role, is evident in many, including 'Quest’, 'Modernism’ and 'Outcast’.

She was a regular exhibitor of still life, landscape and genre scenes in the Society of Artists’ exhibitions throughout the 1930s and ’40s and submitted several major works to the Sulman Prize competition. Until the outbreak of World War II she continued to take art classes as a mature age student at East Sydney Technical College and shared a studio in the city with Douglas Watson, a fellow student. Her first solo exhibition was at Sydney’s Grosvenor Galleries in 1937 as was her second, in 1951. She died in Sydney on 6 March 1971.

Writers:

Strecker, Jacqui Note: Primary.

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

2011