painter, printmaker and art teacher, was born in Beechworth, Victoria on 23 June 1891, second of the five daughters of Richard Hull Perry and Eliza Adelaide, née Reardon. Her father, a solicitor, died when she was an infant and her mother moved to Melbourne with the children. The family moved to Dunedin, New Zealand after her mother remarried in 1904. Adelaide returned to Melbourne to study at the National Gallery School under Bernard Hall and Frederick McCubbin in 1914; in 1920 she won the prestigious National Gallery Travelling Scholarship. After teaching at Ipswich Grammar School (Qld) in 1919-21, she went to London in 1922 and enrolled at the Royal Academy. She also worked in Paris and exhibited at the Salon (Societé des Artistes Française); but, as she said in 1965, it was the English Royal Academy painters – Charles Sims, Walter Sickert, Gerald Kelly, Glyn Philpot and Ernest Jackson – who 'taught me all the art that I know’.
Returning to Australia in 1925, Perry settled in Sydney (where her family was then living) and remained there for the rest of her life. On 1 January 1926 she opened her own studio and art school in Bulletin Place, which she called 'The Chelsea Art School’. She exhibited in the first Contemporary Group show, organised by Thea Proctor and George Lambert , and at Sydney’s Grosvenor Gallery in 1927. She also showed with the more conservative Society of Artists, to which she was elected a member in 1928. She was happy to join the Australian Academy of Art – that litmus test of conservatism – when it was formed in 1937.
For four years from 1930 Perry taught part-time at Julian Ashton 's Sydney Art School with Thea Proctor, taking day classes and encouraging the students 'to work from the real object, in the traditional manner, and base their work on the old masters as much as possible’. Though primarily known as a painter, she also produced linocuts and woodcuts from the late 1920s and taught others these techniques. Her pupils included Vera Blackburn , Lisette Kohlhagen and Mary Cooper Edwards. An article on her work appeared in Art in Australia in September 1927, while three of her prints-a woodcut, a wood engraving and a linocut – illustrated Ethel Anderson 's 'The Subject in Art’ in Art in Australia in September 1929. Her pleasant view of women and children at the beach, Coledale Beach and Village 1929, oil on double sided board (with unfinished portrait study verso), was said to have been illustrated on page 31 of the former – though the article predates the image (another version of it?) – when auctioned at Christie’s Sydney on 14-15 August 1994, lot 194B.
Perry opened another school-the Adelaide Perry School of Art-at Pitt Street, near Circular Quay in May 1933, which continued until forced to close because of the war. Later she had a small studio in Castlereagh Street then took on teaching art full-time at the Presbyterian Ladies College, Croydon, where she remained until retiring to her Hunter’s Hill home in 1962. She continued to paint landscapes, still life and occasional portraits until her death, on 19 November 1973. Her body was cremated at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium.
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 1992
