painter, sketcher, craft-worker and art teacher, was born in 'Cooinda’, Wycombe Road, Neutral Bay, Sydney on 3 February 1916?, the elder of the two children of Florence E. Kent and John Dumeresq Cunningham ('Jock’) Lyall – called 'shipping clerk’ on Nan’s birth certificate but later a prosperous importer/ businessman – who had married in Sydney in 1915. The family moved to Adelaide when Nan was young. She attended the Adelaide Presbyterian Ladies College, learning music, dancing and sport; she also kept a horse. When Nan was about 14 her mother died, aged 38, and Jock married Florence’s sister Violet (Vi) Kent, then middle-aged. Soon afterwards the Depression started and Jock’s business failed. The family returned to Sydney where they mainly stayed with family until taking up residence in an old house after Jock was given the unofficial Engadine Post Office in the mid-1930s and Vi was postmistress. When Vi retired, Jock purchased a soldiers’ settlement block at Engadine. Nan’s sister Jean died of polio aged about 14 (c.1936).

In the early 1930s Nan got a job at David Jones. Because Engadine was too far to travel she lived in Sydney, where she studied art at East Sydney Technical College at night and with Rah Fizelle. She met Bill Hortin at art school, a commercial artist with a club foot who was an extrovert with a great sense of humour and lots of friends. They lived together for years until marrying in 1939, then separated six months later. With many others, they suffered near starvation during the Depression and became committed members of the Communist Youth League (later the Eureka Youth League). Bill became manager of the Communist Party of Australia studio, which employed a number of people to produce banners, etc. for the party and for unions. Since most cultural circles in Sydney were interconnected, Nan knew Rosaleen Norton , the Andersonian libertarians and several dance circles. A number of her sketches of dancers are probably of the Borovansky Ballet, perhaps their productions of 'Scherherazade’ or 'Terra Australis’ (costumes and decor by Eve Harris ) cf Marjorie Penglase 's Borovansky sketches, Pix 10 August 1946, 12-15, 'Is Australian Ballet dying?’

Nan’s main income during WWII came from teaching art at various NSW Dept of Education schools, including the Kindergarten Teachers College in Waverley and North Sydney, and at Technical Colleges. Before this she had a range of casual jobs. {Merewether claims she attended life drawing classes at the George Bell School, Melbourne, in the mid-1930s before travelling to England and India.} Nan and Bill parted in 1939 when Nan went off to China with a member of the Repin family, owners of the Repin chain of coffee shops in Sydney, who was going to Russia to reclaim some of his family’s property and possessions. Nan was refused entry at the Siberian-Sino border so travelled round China alone. She spent some months in Shanghai as governess in a British army family then accompanied them to India for a few months. On her return (with drawings of her travels) at the outbreak of WWII her drawing 'Bombay’ was reproduced in Art in Australia 4/2 (June-August 1941, 63) under the name of “Nan Lyall” but signed 'Nan’ (also represented in the Museum of Art, Bombay, according to 1946 Women Painters’ exhibition catalogue). Merewether claims she began to exhibit with the Contemporary Artists Society on her return, but this was the Melbourne not Sydney Contemporary Artists Society; she submitted 5 works to the 1942 Victorian Contemporary Artists Society exhibition. For the Sydney Contemporary Artists Society Holder has found her exhibiting only in 1950 and 1951, having checked cats of 1946, 1949-51 and 1953-54.

Her partner in 1945-46 was Douglas Campbell, an artist who chiefly made woodblock and linocut prints, often published in the Saturday Herald , and who later became a fervent Anglican. They lived in Forbes Street, Woolloomooloo, with Jean Kelly, Studio of Realist Art Secretary (later Jean Smail), until moving to a flat over Grubbs the Butcher’s in a lane off George Street, near Circular Quay. Smail describes Nan as 'a genius of a dressmaker… whatever she saw she could do… for example she took up shoemaking after she had observed the process in China’. In 1943 she made papier-mâché sculptured figures that were shown in 'Woman Represents Peace’ for the Australian Women’s Charter in 1943 (the organisation that published Australian Women’s Digest in 1944-48).

A foundation member of Studio of Realist Art in late 1944, Hortin was an active committee member. She also prepared Studio of Realist Art banners and other visual material for May Day marches and scenery and costumes for productions at the New Theatre. She exhibited in all Studio of Realist Art’s exhibitions (1946-49), showing oil paintings and crayon drawings in the first show (August 1946) at David Jones Art Gallery (see catalogue). One of her drawings of dancing couples became the cover of the March 1946 (no.9) Studio of Realist Art Bulletin (ill. Merewether, 79), for which she occasionally wrote as well as drew. She made gigantic papier-mâché figures for the Immigration part of the Australian section of the 1947 British Empire Exhibition at the Sydney Showground. (Was it part of that year’s Royal Easter Show?)

After the Studio of Realist Art studio was gutted by fire in 1947 the group was allowed to use the Waterside Workers’ Federation Hall, where they set up the Wharfies Art Group (active 1947-58) and where Nan taught art to wharfies’ children, with Vi Collings assisting from c.1952-55. She painted some wonderful murals on the history of the working class in the WWF canteen. Smail says that by 1945-46 she was very involved in painting murals, influenced by Diego de Riviera and José Orozco. She showed mural proposals in the 'Art in Public Life’ exhibition at the Education Department Gallery in October 1946. 'Arrival of Ordinary Settlers’ (convicts in chains), a drawing illustrated in the 1946 Women Painters’ catalogue, looks like a sketch for a mural.

In the late 1940s Hortin went to Brisbane, held a solo exhibition at Brisbane’s Moreton Galleries in 1950, then returned to Sydney. Her son, Michael George Adams, was born in Sydney in 1953. Nan had married the child’s father, George Adams, when she became pregnant, but they separated well before the birth. She purchased and did up a very small house in Euroca Street, North Sydney, and lived there for years with her son. In 1963, when Michael was 10 or 11, they moved with Tom Morrison to Yorkies {sp?} Knob in North Queensland, about 20 km outside Cairns, where they built their own 'ridiculously designed’ house. Ray Crooke was a close neighbour. Nan taught at the local TAFE.

Nan died in 1971. Then Michael, who had just started a course at Rockhampton TAFE, was killed in a motorcycle accident aged 19 or 20 and within the same eighteen-month period Tom Morrison died 'in the garden’. Nan’s estate went to George Adams, who sold most of it. Her collection of books, mostly socialist literature and philosophy, was donated to Townsville Library.

In Queensland her style changed completely to mainly pastel sketches and oils of tropical landscapes, seascapes and views. Almost all her work has disappeared, apart from a couple of oil paintings and some works on paper found in the Balmain markets one Saturday morning, acc. Merewether (late 1970s or c.1980?). They include Embracing Figures c.1947, pencil and pastel, Cafe Benefit c.1946, coloured crayon on paper, and Form c.1946, oil on masonite. All were still privately held when shown by Charles Merewether in 1984 (NB: NGA now has 15 drawings by Hortin). Hortin is not mentioned in Serle’s Artist in the Tropics .

Writers:

Holder, Jo

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007