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sculptor, painter, potter and art teacher, was born in Richmond Villa, The Domain, Sydney, on 13 November 1868, the daughter of Samuel Cohen and Elizabeth, née Marks. Labelled 'Australia’s first born woman sculptor’ in William Moore’s The Story of Australian Art (Sydney 1934), Margaret Preston was perhaps more accurate in her article 'Pioneer women artists’ (in The Peaceful Army , Sydney 1938, ed. Flora Eldershaw) when she described her as 'the first woman born in Sydney to take up sculpture as a profession’. She studied at Sydney Technical College (1887-88) under the French sculptor and decorative artist Lucien Henry , who advised her to continue her studies abroad. In 1889, accompanied by her family, she went to Florence. There she faced discrimination from the authorities at the Accademia di Belle Arti, not only as a woman but also because her Australian art credentials were not recognised. So she studied in the Florentine studio of the American sculptor Longworth Powers (1835-1904) and was given private tuition by Professor Augusto Rivalta (1837-1925) of the Accademia. She was influenced by the work of women sculptors such as Feodora Gleichen (1861-1922), Bessie Potter (1872-1955) and, in particular, Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908), whom she met in Rome. They provided Theo with what she saw as necessary role models to justify her own professional career.

Following the death of her father in Italy, Theo returned to Australia in 1895, where economic circumstances may have made it necessary for her to earn her own living. At first she obtained some prestigious portrait commissions. Her bust of Sir Henry Parkes shown in the 1895 annual exhibition of the Society of Artists was said to have 'attracted much notice’, although 'an Amateur Critic’ for Cosmos Magazine 2/1 (30 September 1895, 79) commented that it was 'considered generally too tame a representation of the veteran salesman’. Nevertheless, she was then commissioned to do busts of Eccleston Du Faur (1897) and E.L. Montefiore (1898) for the National Art Gallery of NSW – the former being the first commission given to an Australian artist by the Trustees and the cause of some controversy in the NSW Parliament. In 1899 she showed her bust of Sir Edmund Barton with the Society of Artists, of which she was a founding member.

After submitting designs, but failing to win any of the commissions for larger sculptural works in Sydney, Theo Cowan left for England. Her career in London (1901-13) is not fully documented, but she executed portrait commissions and small statuettes there and was prominent among the expatriate community. In 1907 she won first prize for a bronze sculpture called Will-o’-the-Wisp at the London exhibition of work by expatriate Australian women artists in association with the First Australian Exhibition of Women’s Work about to be held in Melbourne. After returning to Sydney she exhibited with the Society of Women Painters, taught and continued to attract small commissions, mainly for portrait busts and statuettes. The Lone Hand ran an article about her on 1 October 1913, which commented: 'As its title conveys, [ Will-o’-the-Wisp ] does not carry the intensity of thought, and earnestness of purpose, coupled with an exquisite sense of the poetical, which is to be found in her later work, “Advance Australia.”’

In 1916 Cowan modelled a soldier with kit and rifle to serve as a model for disabled soldiers proposing to work at toy making. Her later sculptural career seems to have ended in artistic frustration and poverty due in part, she felt, to prejudice because she was a woman. She submitted competent designs for a fountain in 1913 and a Women’s War Memorial in 1921, but such large commissions always eluded her. After 1921 she turned to watercolours and art pottery, setting up the short-lived Koala Pottery in her North Sydney studio in 1932. She died at Vaucluse on 27 August 1949.

IMAGE: Memorial Plaque 1899, terracotta. Booloominbah, University of New England, Armidale( Heritage chapter 9, plate 368).

Booloominbah was the home of the White family of Armidale, one of the most prominent pioneer families in the New England district. The house designed by architect John Horbury Hunt in Arts and Crafts style was completed in 1888. Booloominbah is notable not only because it was built on a grand scale but also for the quality of the decoration, which is an integral part of both the interior and exterior design. It is now the administration centre for the University of New England.

Theo Cowan was commissioned in 1899 to create a memorial plaque to commemorate a family tragedy. Perhaps she was given the commission because she was well known in Sydney’s social and artistic circles at the time; indeed, she may well have been known personally to both Horbury Hunt and the White family. The tragedy occurred that year on a family picnic. Ethel White jumped into the river to help her sister who was in difficulties. A family servant saved her sister, but Ethel, aged twenty-two, drowned. It is therefore appropriate that the imagery on the plaque recording this act of heroism is deliberately feminine in concept. The subject seems to have been created by the artist in response to the commission itself, for there is no established iconographical tradition in memorials for the recording angel being female or being linked with figures representing Dawn and Evening. The fact of Ethel White’s heroism is not recorded on the plaque; indeed, that history was lost for many years.

In a photograph taken in 1888 the niche at the main entrance to the house is empty. It was the ideal position for the memorial plaque. The plaque of terracotta, a material sympathetic to the warm brickwork of the house, was modelled in clay in low relief then cut into sections to be fired. The sections were then reassembled and cemented into position. The original surface may have been treated in order to protect it, as well as to conceal the joins of the sections.

In a decorative style in the manner of the Arts and Crafts movement in England, painted mottoes are used as borders in most of the interior rooms at Booloominbah. Theo Cowan followed the usage of the house and chose the motto 'From morning until night, an angel evermore doth write our deeds in the book of life’ as her inspiration. The hair and garments of the central figure, the recording angel, are conceived as a mass of swirling movement. The good and bad deeds of humankind are recorded in the open Book of Life on her lap. On either side of her are two recumbent female figures, perhaps symbolising the two sisters as well as representing Dawn and Evening with their respective attributes of sun and moon.

The female figure of Dawn is Classical in style, suggesting the influence of the eighteenth century Italian neo-classical sculptor Antonio Canova whose work Cowan would have seen in Rome. The central angel with the flowing hair, however, and the figure of Evening, are reminiscent of the work of the late nineteenth-century 'New Sculptors’ in Britain such as George Frampton. Although the juxtaposition of the severe classic lines of the figure symbolising Dawn with the romantic images of the angel and the figure representing Evening is rather awkward and has not really been resolved, this is a romantic and imaginative example of Theo Cowan’s modelling skill. It is also one of the few examples of her work, other than portraiture, to have survived.

Writers:

Cousins, Kerry-Anne

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

1992