Eden, South Coast NSW

Painter, printmaker and art teacher, born in Beechworth, Victoria on 23 June 1891. 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 (Societ� des Artistes Fran�aise) 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 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’. source Joan Kerr.