Design and Art Australia Online

painter, sculptor and writer, was born in Croydon, Surrey. She came to Melbourne with her family in 1852, aged about 9, and later joined classes held by sculptor Charles Summers. She was one of the first three students permitted to copy from the antique plaster casts (restored by Summers after their long journey to the Antipodes) in the newly opened National Gallery of Victoria . Thomas exhibited sculptures in Melbourne from the first exhibition of the Victorian Society of Fine Arts in December 1857 (a 'Medallion Portrait’) until after she left Australia. Although Theresa Walker and Elizabeth Kelly also made small-scale sculptures (wax medallions and cameos), Thomas was the only woman in any of the Australian colonies known to have modelled large-scale sculptures at this time. Ironically, the Daphne she showed in the 1860 Victorian Exhibition of Fine Arts was attributed to James Scurry in the catalogue, corrected (by hand) in the State Library of Victoria’s copy.

When Thomas’s bust of Dr A. Barnett and a plaster figure, Napea , were shown at the 1861 Victorian Exhibition, the former won a first-class certificate, and both were included in the 1862 London International Exhibition. At the 1863 Ballarat Mechanics Institute Exhibition she showed a 'Cabinet bust’ (afterwards donated to the Auction Bazaar) and two portrait medallions. One was of Burke and Wills, subsequently the subject of her teacher’s most famous work. Her own best-known portrait, The Late Charles Summers, Esq. (o/c, 127.5 × 102 cm, La Trobe Library), was long dated 1879 (the year after Summers died in 1878) due to an ambiguous inscription on the back but is now accepted as the portrait of her teacher she showed in the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition, probably reworked in England. It depicts an almost life size Summers, aged about forty, in his Melbourne studio with a maquette of his major Australian work in the background – the life-size Burke and Wills Melbourne sculpture (which was not completed until 1869) – and was certainly painted in Summers’s Melbourne studio. Thomas presented it to the National Gallery of Victoria in 1881.

Painting was soon Thomas’s major medium. In 1862 she showed a painted portrait at the Annual Exhibition of Fine Arts in Melbourne (although it is not certain – despite the Argus critic of 5 January 1862 who believed they were one and the same – that she was also the Miss C. Thomas who exhibited [painted] Flowers from Nature ). In 1864 she exhibited one sculpture, The Quadroon Girl (with a descriptive quote by Longfellow) and six paintings or drawings: Portrait of Miss T.M. Thomas , Portrait of G. Knowles Parker, Esq. (described in the Argus as one of the two best portraits in the room), A Girl Crocheting , a miniature portrait, and two scenes from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King : 'Enid and Geraint’ (with quote) and 'Merlin and Vivien’ (ditto). [ Greig also showed a Vivien painting, and cf Sophia Sinnett .] The Argus described the last as an 'interesting sketch, but the expression thrown into the faces of the figures, the excellence of the attitudes in which they are placed, and the effect of a few rough touches by way of background and sky, prove that this work, had more time been devoted to it, would have been one of the most interesting and attractive of the exhibition’. A Girl Crocheting was said to bear 'the same mark of haste and want of care, and much of the same promise’.

The jurors’ report at the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition commended Miss Thomas as 'a most industrious student of art, who has exhibited many well-executed copies in oil, as well as models in plaster, and an original portrait cameo, excellently carved.’ Her own exhibits included an oil version of The Quadroon Girl (according to the catalogue); C.E. Horsely exhibited her portrait medallion of himself and the five oil paintings included the portrait of Charles Summers.

She was represented at the 1869 Ballarat Mechanics Institute Exhibition by a 'Shell Cameo Portrait’ lent by T. Thomas, possibly the subject, and oil copies of paintings by Eddis, Cope and Reynolds lent by local residents H.T. Dwight and Judge Bindon. A cast, Boy and Dog , was apparently shown by Thomas herself, although she had actually already left Australia. In 1867 she followed Summers, his wife (whom he had married in Victoria) and their young son to Italy, then moved to London and spent ten months studying at the South Kensington Schools. In 1869 she was again living in Rome, spending most of her time visiting the works of the great masters and sometimes copying their work (Clayton, 260). Two and a half years later (1871) she returned to London and entered the Royal Academy Schools for two years, becoming the first woman ever to receive the academy’s silver medal for modelling at the end of her studies. Several English portrait busts survive, including marble ones of Charles Summers (c.1878, Shire Hall, Taunton, Somerset), Henry Fielding (1880s), Dr Wilson Fox (1888) and Richard Jefferies (1891, Salisbury Cathedral, England).

Thomas’s paintings have largely disappeared even though they greatly outnumbered sculptures in her oeuvre. Of the thirty-three works included in major London exhibitions between 1868 and 1880 only one (the first) was a sculpture – a medallion of Frederick Wallis shown at the Royal Academy in 1868. Ten works were subsequently hung at the Academy from addresses in Croydon and Pimlico, but all were paintings, apparently oils. Eight were portraits (six shown in 1874 alone) preceded in 1873 by a biblical subject ( Rachel ) and a literary one ( Renzo: I Promessi Sposi ). Between 1872 and 1880 she showed seven watercolours and ten oils with the Society of British Artists (Suffolk Street), mainly domestic genre like Italian Girl and A Rainy Afternoon (1872/1873), Roman Woman (1874/1875, w/c), Companions (1877/1878, oil) and Ianthe (1878, oil). A few portraits were shown at Suffolk Street in later years, and oil landscape paintings are also known.

Douglas Sladen stated in 1888 that Thomas had made enough from her portraits to be able to retire on the proceeds in order to devote her life to travel and to writing and illustrating travel books. Typical titles are A Scamper through Spain and Tangier (1892), Two Years in Palestine and Syria… (1899) and Denmark, Past and Present (1902). She travelled with Rev. John Kelman to do the sixty-seven illustrations in his From Damascus to Palmyra (London, 1908). How To Judge Pictures (1906) and How To Understand Sculpture (1911) are simply written basic primers, while her best-known book is a hagiography of Charles Summers (1879); its title, A Hero of the Workshop , aptly encapsulates its tone. She also published poems in English, American and Australian periodicals. Sladen included seven in his anthology Australian Poets, 1788 to 1880 (London, 1888) and others appeared in the all-women anthology Coo-ee (London 1890) edited by Harriette Anne Martin.

Margaret Thomas died at Norton, near Letchworth, Hertfordshire on 24 December 1929, aged eighty-six. Her early plaster medallion of Sir Redmond Barry, purchased for the NGV in 1881 for three guineas, and a collection of watercolour sketches of Australian landscapes signed 'M. Thomas’, also believed to be her work, are now in the La Trobe Library. She is also represented in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

1989