Tempe Manning was one of of the many students of Anthony Dattilo-Rubbo who were responsible for introducing modernism to Australia. However unlike her fellows, Grace Cossington Smith, Roy De Maistre and Roland Wakelin, she continued to exhibit with the conservative Royal Art Society.
She first studied at Dattilo-Rubbo’s studio in about 1910 before travelling to Paris to study. On the outbreak of World War I she returned to Sydney and Dattilo-Rubbo’s Atelier. She temporarily abandoned the academic approach she had taken in Paris and enthusiastically joined with fellow students in experimenting with a more liberated use of colour. Portrait of a Boy, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is typical of her work from this period.
She was always inclined to paint portraits and became a regular entrant in the Archibald Prize, exhibiting portraits in 1931,1933,1934,1936,1938,1939,1940,1943,1945,1950,1952,1953.
Her 1945 Archibald entry of Senator Dorothy Tangey was commissioned when she and Mary Edwards were approached to paint the portraits of the first two women members of Federal Parliament by the Historic Memorials Committee, 'for ultimate inclusion in a National Portrait Gallery’. However both her painting and Mary Edwards’s portrait of Dame Enid Lyons (TMAG) were rejected as 'unsatisfactory’ and replaced with portraits by A.D. Colquhoun and William Dargie.
Manning lived in Bowral for most of her life (12 Merigan Street?). Had a retrospective exhibition at Berrima.*
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
Joanna Mendelssohn
- Date written:
- 1999
- Last updated:
- 2019
