page_title: Florence Fuller
section_title: Perth
hierarchical_section_title: Florence Fuller / Perth
caption_attribution_description: English: Florence Fuller's A Golden Hour (1905), oil on canvas
context_page_description: Florence Ada Fuller was a South African-born Australian artist. Originally from Port Elizabeth, Fuller migrated as a child to Melbourne with her family. There she trained with her uncle Robert Hawker Dowling and teacher Jane Sutherland and took classes at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, becoming a professional artist in the late 1880s. In 1892 she left Australia, travelling first to South Africa, where she met and painted for Cecil Rhodes, and then on to Europe. She lived and studied there for the subsequent decade, except for a return to South Africa in 1899 to paint a portrait of Rhodes. Between 1895 and 1904 her works were exhibited at the Paris Salon and London's Royal Academy.
  In 1904, Fuller returned to Australia, living in Perth. She became active in the Theosophical Society and painted some of her best-known work, including A Golden Hour, described by the National Gallery of Australia as a "masterpiece" when it acquired the work in 2013. Beginning in 1908, Fuller travelled extensively, living in India and England before ultimately settling in Sydney.
context_section_description: Further recognition came with the hanging of one of Fuller's paintings, Summer Breezes, at the Royal Academy in 1904. Other Australian artists whose works were hung at the same time included Rupert Bunny, E. Phillips Fox, Albert Fullwood, George Lambert, and Arthur Streeton. Fuller was the only woman painter to be represented. A critic writing in The West Australian observed:
  The work ... is essentially Australian in almost every detail. Standing in a sunlit Australian paddock, a lithesome Australian blonde holds her summer hat on against the rude caresses of an Australian breeze—a subject simple but grand in its simplicity ... Next to its suggestion of breezy sunshine and the incidental portrayal of willowy grace the picture is to be admired for its colour scheme ... The details of the picture disclose untiring care.
  By the time Summer Breezes was on display, Fuller had returned to Australia, not to her previous home in Melbourne but to Perth in Western Australia, where she joined her sister, Amy Fuller, who was a singer. Although only in her mid-thirties, Fuller's background made her "one of the most experienced artists in Western Australia at this time". For the next four years, she painted portraits, including one of Western Australian politician James George Lee Steere, undertaken posthumously from photographs and recollections of those who had known him. It was acquired by the gallery whose board he chaired. She also took on students, including French-Australian artist Kathleen O'Connor.
  
  Fuller's paintings from this period included A Golden Hour, described by the National Gallery of Australia as "a masterpiece ... giving us a gentle insight into the people, places and times that make up our history". The painting, an oil on canvas 109 cm (43 in) high and 135 cm (53 in) wide, portrays a woman and a man standing together in a rural setting in late afternoon, surrounded by grass, scattered gum trees, and Xanthorrhoea. When the painting was put up for sale in 2012, the auction house catalogue stated that it had been owned by William Ride, former director of the Western Australian Museum. It reported:
  The current owners assert that Professor Ride always understood the figures in the picture were Sir John Winthrop Hackett, (then owner of The West Australian newspaper, well known business man and philanthropist, whose gift allowed the construction of the impressive University of Western Australia buildings and St. George's Residential College) and his new wife, Deborah Vernon Hackett".
  
  In addition to appearing as the small figure of a woman in A Golden Hour, Deborah Vernon Hackett was also the subject of a portrait, painted around 1908, again during Fuller's time in Perth. Anne Gray, the head of Australian art at the National Gallery of Australia, observed of Fuller's approach to the newspaperman's wife, that:
  Fuller portrayed her sitter sympathetically, capturing the young woman's grace and charm. But she also conveyed the complexity of the young Mrs Hackett's character through her soft, feminine, pale-blue dress counterpoised by the dramatic black hat and direct gaze.
  
  Fuller painted other works for the Hacketts. In a 1937 piece reflecting on early twentieth-century art in Western Australia, a reviewer recalled:
  Dr. (later Sir Winthrop) Hackett was a great patron of Miss Fuller, and he was a constant visitor to her dignified studio, above his office in the old West Australian Chambers. The first portrait I saw Miss Fuller working on was of Mrs. E. Chase ... The portrait was a commission from Dr. Hackett, and was destined to hang in his gallery. Miss Fuller painted Lady Hackett both before and after her marriage, and one particularly happy picture of her is as a young girl gathering wildflowers in the Darlington hills. Her portraits of the first Hackett babies were charming studies of childhood.
caption: A Golden Hour, 1905
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