page_title: Jessie Traill
section_title: Sydney Harbour Bridge series
hierarchical_section_title: Jessie Traill / Sydney Harbour Bridge series
caption_attribution_description: English: shows Jessie Traill proofing an etching by subdued light
context_page_description: Jessie Constance Alicia Traill was an Australian printmaker. Trained by Frederick McCubbin at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, and by painter and printmaker Frank Brangwyn in London, Traill worked in England and France in the period immediately preceding World War I. During the war she served in hospitals with the Voluntary Aid Detachment.
  Traill is best known for a series of prints created in the early 1930s depicting the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Critic and art historian Sasha Grishin describes her as "one of the great Australian artists of the 20th century".
context_section_description: When the Australian Painter-Etchers Society in 1932 held its only thematic exhibition, Sydney Harbour Bridge Celebrations, Traill contributed a series of seven prints. The works comprised six etchings completed across the period 1927 to 1931, and a coloured aquatint created after construction was finished in 1932. These have become Traill's best known and most highly regarded images. At the time they were created, the artist Arthur Streeton observed:
   Melbourne should be proud of that fine draughtswoman and etcher Miss Jessie Traill. By incessant labour and observation she has won for herself a high position by her fine sense of design and her most capable rendering of very difficult subjects. She dares to do a large drawing composed of enormous curves and angles and she does it successfully. There is no other artist in Australia today who can compare with her in the fine and varied exhibition of Sydney Bridge and other designs which will open today at the Athenaeum Gallery. Her drawings of the Harbour Bridge from 1927 to 1931 form a triumphant and original record of that mighty masterpiece of steel, and it would be well if the finest of them were acquired and housed as a national collection and an artistic record of the structure. 
  Describing the series as "perhaps the finest representations of this genre", National Gallery of Australia curator Roger Butler singled out her Building the Harbour Bridge VI: Nearly complete, June 1931 for comment, with its "towering, skeletal structure framed by foreground cranes". Sandy Kirby, writing for The National Women's Art Book in the mid-1990s, focussed on the earlier, fourth print in the series, Building the Harbour Bridge IV: The Ant's Progress, noting how it drew attention "to the technical feat of building, reflected as much in the viewpoint Traill selected as in the very medium of etching itself, with its linear emphasis echoing engineering drawing".
  Reviewing an exhibition of Traill's works, art critic Christopher Allen, writing for The Australian in 2013, considered the images of Sydney Harbour Bridge to be "her greatest achievement".
caption: Jessie Traill proofing an etching by subdued light, (H2000.63/6, Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria)
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