In 1933, a wealthy, highly decorated high society
painter just packed her life into a car and she
drove straight into the brutal drought stricken
heart of the Australian outback. Wow. Yeah, but
she wasn't out there looking for inspiration
for like her next masterpiece. She was actually
looking to build a massive water pipeline. It
is just such a striking image, isn't it? I mean,
you expect an award winning artist from that
era to be, you know, safely tucked away in a
Parisian studio somewhere, sipping coffee, painting
portraits of the elite. But here she is out in
the dirt and the blistering heat, completely
redefining what it means to be a creator and
a citizen. Exactly. So welcome to our deep dive.
Today we're looking at an incredible stack of
source material centered on the Wikipedia article
of Violet Teague. She was a pioneering Australian
artist who lived from 1872 to 1951. An amazing
life. Truly. And our mission today is to dig
into that extraordinary boundary pushing life.
We're going to explore how she defied the conventions
of her era by blending rigorous classical training
with radical activism. And completely pioneering
new artistic mediums along the way. Yes. Okay,
let's unpack this. Because being well -informed
for you listening, it isn't just about memorizing
historical dates. It is about understanding how
one person's relentless curiosity can actually
reshape multiple disciplines at once. And Violet
Teague's curiosity was absolutely relentless.
I mean, it really was. But to understand how
she was able to break so many rules in the art
world, you have to look at her foundation first.
Because she had to master those rules before
she could break them. Right, exactly. You have
to know the architecture of the box. before you
step outside of it. So let's trace her journey
a bit. She was born in Melbourne in 1872, and
interestingly, her father, James Teague, was
a homeopath. Which is an interesting detail.
It is. And while that might sound like just a
random biographical fact, practicing homeopathy
in the 1870s required this intense, meticulous
observation of minute symptoms. Oh, I see where
you're going with this, like a highly holistic
view of the patient. Exactly. You can almost
see how she inherited that incredibly observant,
detail -oriented way of looking at the world.
That is a great connection. She was definitely
raised to look closely. Sadly, her mother passed
away when she was an infant, so she was raised
by her father and his second wife. in a very
cultured environment. She had a governess, she
learned French and the classics, finished at
the Presbyterian Ladies College in Melbourne.
But her true visual education really ignited
when she traveled to Europe as a young woman.
And traveling from Australia to Europe in the
1890s was not a quick flight. It was a massive,
months -long commitment by ship. Oh, a huge journey.
Those early European tours were deeply formative
for her. Imagine being a young aspiring artist
from colonial Melbourne, right? Right. Your only
exposure to the great masters was probably through
like small flat black and white book reproductions.
Yeah, just little prints. Exactly. Yeah. And
suddenly you were standing in galleries across
Germany, France, Belgium. the Netherlands, and
England. That must have been mind -blowing. Totally.
The sources note she specifically recalled visiting
Spanish galleries and being completely captivated
by Velasquez, his incredibly lifelike horses,
and the vibrant coloring of Raphael. Seeing that
in person, seeing the actual scale and the texture
of the brush strokes, the physical presence of
the paint, I mean, it rewires your visual vocabulary
entirely. It really does. sets an impossibly
high bar. But she didn't just look in a go -home.
She put in the grueling work to reach that bar.
She spent years in formal training. From 1893
to 1896, she's in a Brussels studio under the
French artist Ernest Blanquerin. Right. Then
she heads to England to study at Hubert von Herkimer
School. Finally, she returns to Melbourne and
enrolls at the National Gallery of Victoria Art
School, the NGV. But there's a fascinating twist
there. Yeah, as I was reading through the sources,
I noticed this too. While she's getting this
very formal instruction at the NGV, she is simultaneously
studying at the Melbourne School of Art. Yes,
and that dual enrollment is a crucial distinction.
The Melbourne School of Art was run by E. Phillips
Fox and tutor St. George Tucker. Right? They
were teaching the liberal, progressive methods
of the French Impressionist schools they'd attended.
It was a stark contrast to the rigid, traditional,
anatomy -focused methods of the NGV. It's like
she's living a double life. On one hand, she's
getting the strict Academy -style training at
the NGV, which is kind of like working an incredibly
strict corporate job where you have to wear a
suit every day and learn the underlying code
of the business. That's a great way to put it.
But then, Fox and Tucker establish a summer school
at Chartersville, which was actually Australia's
first recognized summer school of art. They take
over this old mansion above the Yar River, and
it's full of artists painting plein air. And
for anyone unfamiliar, plein air literally means
painting in the open air. Instead of sitting
in a dark control studio painting a posed model,
these artists were dragging their easels outside.
Into the elements. Right, into the elements to
capture the immediate raw sunlight of the Australian
landscape. With the harsh sun drying the paint
quickly and the wind blowing, forcing you to
use rapid, confident brushstrokes, it's like
she left that strict corporate job to go join
a chaotic, fast -paced startup hackathon. Yes.
Where everyone is just throwing ideas at the
wall and building the product in real time. She
might have even been a tutor there, actually.
What's fascinating here is that this dual education
is exactly why Teague became so incredibly adaptable.
later in life. She wasn't locked into one singular
way of seeing the world. Right, she had both
toolkits. Exactly. The National Gallery School
taught her discipline, proportion, and technique.
The Chartersville Summer School taught her light,
immediacy, and emotional resonance. Because she
fluently spoke both visual languages. She was
never intimidated by a new medium. She already
knew how to synthesize totally different approaches.
Precisely. And she really did synthesize them.
Because her willingness to experiment didn't
stop at just how she applied oil paint. to a
canvas. It pushed her to introduce entirely new,
highly technical artistic mediums to the Australian
public. Like her work with Japanese woodblocks.
Yes. Let's look at the woodblocks. Printing from
a carved woodblock obviously has a massive, centuries
-long history in Japan. Oh, of course. But in
Australia, at the turn of the 20th century, it
was virtually unknown as a fine art form. Teague
became the first Australian to demonstrate a
sustained interest in and a real mechanical mastery
of this incredibly difficult technique. And it
is so physically demanding. I was looking into
how this actually works. And to make a colored
woodblock print, you can't just paint on a block
and stamp it. You have to carve a separate individual
wooden block for every single color in the image.
It's unbelievable. And then you have to line
up the paper perfectly on every single block
using these tiny registration marks so the colors
don't overlap in the wrong spots. It requires
insane precision. It is an unforgiving medium.
One slip of the carving knife or just a millimeter
of misalignment on the paper and the entire print
is ruined. It takes a mathematical level of planning
combined with a highly delicate artistic touch.
Which makes her 1905 project so wild. She collaborates
with her friend Geraldine Reed out of her Collins
Street studio, and they publish a book together
called Nightfall in the Thai Tree. Such a great
title. Picture this. It's a 32 page haiku style
text. It tells the story of the simple life of
bushland rabbits, and it features 16 colored
woodblock illustrations. Our sources note that
this collaborative little book is the the very
first example of colored woodblock printing in
Australia. It's also considered the first Australian
artist's book. It's a beautifully intimate project.
The subject matter Bushland Rabbits might seem
quaint, but it was essentially a Trojan horse
for highly complex, avant -garde printmaking
techniques. Yeah, that's true. But then... She
scales her ambitions up to something monumental.
She ventures into highly unusual territory for
Australian art at the time, Protestant altar
paintings. Wait, hang on. I'm trying to map out
her career path in my head, and I am getting
absolute whiplash. I know, it's a lot. She goes
from strict European Academy training to a delicate,
highly technical haiku book about rabbits, and
then pivots again to massive Protestant altar
pieces. She gets a commission in 1910 for a church
in Wanan where her friend, Jesse Trail, designs
the frame. Then in 1921, she exhibits a massive
altarpiece at King Lake, billed as a memorial
to soldiers who died in World War I. That's right.
How do these wildly different things belong to
the same artist? Well, it does look completely
disjointed if you only look at the surface. But
if you look at the underlying philosophy, it
makes perfect sense. OK, how so? It's a testament
to her core belief that the medium should serve
the message, not the other way around. If the
message is a quiet personal observation of nature,
you use a delicate Japanese woodblock. Ah, I
see. Right. But if the message is communal grief
and memorializing lost soldiers, you create a
towering public altarpiece. She refused to let
the art market or societal expectations dictate
her tools. She chose the exact tool that the
human experience required in that specific moment.
Here's where it gets really interesting, because
while she's playing with these niche experimental
mediums back home in Australia, she is simultaneously
dominating the very traditional, highly competitive
global stage. Yes, she was. She isn't just some
local, eccentric, trying -out hobbies. She is
a world -class master playing the elite game
and winning. Absolutely. She exhibited regularly
at the Paris Salons, which were the absolute
epicenter of the global art world. You had to
conquer Paris. If you wanted to be recognized
internationally, you had to. And as early as
1897, her portrait of Colonel Reed brought her
major accolades from the Société des Artistes
Français. But her real triumph came a bit later.
The piece that really cemented her legacy. Yes,
her famous 1911 painting, The Boy with the Palette.
Just a powerhouse of a painting. It really is.
It's a portrait of a young art student named
Theo Scharf. The painting has these incredibly
rich dark tones that make the boy's face and
the palette he's holding just pop off the canvas.
You can really see that early influence of Velazquez
she absorbed in Europe. The confident brushwork,
the dramatic lighting. And the judges in Paris
clearly saw it too. In 1920, it won a silver
prize at the Old Salon in Paris. Think about
the logistics of that achievement for a second.
An Australian woman based in Melbourne paints
a portrait ships it across the world and takes
silver in Paris against the best painters on
earth. It's incredible. The judges loved it because
it combined flawless technical mastery with deep
psychological presence. The boy isn't just a
model. He looks like a real breathing person
staring right back at you. And it didn't stop
in Paris either. The painting was later hung
at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Following
that 1920 Paris Salon, the celebrated Australian
artist Rupert Bunny, who was a massive deal at
the time, huge deal, he wrote to Teague specifically
to tell her that The Boy with the Palette was
one of the best works in that entire year's exhibition.
That peer validation is immense. It proves that
her unconventional path, her dabbling in wood
blocks and altarpieces didn't dilute her technical
oil painting skills. It actually enhanced them.
She brought completely unique perspective to
a very traditional format. So she had conquered
the elite salons of Europe. But instead of settling
into a comfortable, lucrative life as a high
society portraitist in Melbourne, she leveraged
all of that elite cultural capital for something
entirely physical and grounded. Which brings
us to the outback. Yes, to what is arguably her
ultimate masterpiece. It wasn't on canvas or
paper at all. It was her activism. The year is
1933. Teague her sister una and their friendly
artist Jesse trail who designed that altar frame
earlier Yeah, they decide to travel to the hermansburg
mission in Central, Australia And we have to
picture what a road trip into the outback looked
like in 1933. There are no paved highways. There
are no gas stations every few miles. No air conditioning.
No. They're driving cars like Model A Fords over
rutted dirt cracks, carrying their own petrol
and tins, dealing with boiling radiators, suffocating
dust in the lethal heat. It was a physically
grueling, genuinely dangerous expedition. It
was an incredible undertaking. And while she's
there at the mission, she actually befriends
the famed Aboriginal artist Albert Nup. They
go on painting excursions together, right? Yeah,
they share techniques. And they become so close
that he later names one of his children after
her. But amidst this artistic connection, she
discovers a horrific reality on the ground. The
drought. Yes. The area had recently suffered
a severe prolonged drought. And as a result of
the extreme water shortage, a third of the aboriginal
population at the mission had died. It was a
humanitarian crisis of devastating proportions.
Now, a lot of artists might have painted a tragic
picture of the drought, sold it in Melbourne,
and called it a day. Teague didn't do that. No,
she mobilized. She and her sister organized an
exhibition specifically to raise money for a
water pipeline to transport clean water from
a distant spring straight to the mission. And
this is where her elite status becomes a weapon
for good. She uses her standing in the art community
to get the absolute heavyweights to donate works
for this exhibition. She gets pieces from Frederick
McCubbin. E. Phillips Fox, Han Tyson, and Jesse
Trail. They end up raising more than 2 ,000 pounds.
Now, to put that into context, this is the 1930s,
right in the middle of the Great Depression.
2 ,000 pounds was an astronomical amount of money.
Oh, absolutely massive. She essentially realized
that the high society art market was full of
wealthy people who would buy paintings no matter
the economic climate. So she hacked the system.
She used the art market as an ATM for humanitarian
aid, trading canvas and oil paint for literal
steel pipe. and digging equipment. And it worked.
The pipeline was laid in 1935 from Caparola Springs
directly to the mission. It's a stunning example
of applied empathy. She literally used art to
bring life -saving water to the desert. But her
activism wasn't just limited to fundraising,
it was also fiercely intellectual and political.
Teague has been identified by scholars as one
of Australia's first female art critics. She
wrote essays and commentary. Right. But more
radically, she used her pen to challenge the
dominant, very comfortable colonial narratives
of her era. She wrote a series of letters to
major newspapers, The Argus, The Age, and The
Herald, to announce the Hermansburg Group exhibition.
But in these letters, she went much further than
just promoting the art show. She definitely did.
She argued that Aboriginal people had survived,
quote, 100 years of our occupation and that they
were cheated of their inheritance by colonialism.
Which was a shocking thing to say in print back
then. It really was. And just as a quick note
for you listening, as we dig into these 1930s
newspaper archives, our goal here isn't to take
a political stance or endorse the rhetoric of
the era. We're simply looking objectively at
the facts of what Teague wrote in the source
text. Of course. just reporting what she wrote.
Exactly. And when you look at those letters,
the sources note she was openly defying the eugenicist
justifications of her time. Those were theories
that falsely claimed that aboriginal people were
in an innately inferior dying race. She was publicly
calling out the systemic injustice of colonialism
in major dailies. If we connect this to the bigger
picture, the sheer courage it took to write those
specific words in the 1930s cannot be overstated.
She was a respected figure in elite society.
Her paintings were bought by the very people
who benefited most from that colonial system.
She had a lot to lose. Exactly. For a public
figure of her stature to publicly frame European
settlement as an occupation and to fiercely attack
eugenicist theories. She was an absolute outlier.
She risked alienating the entire society that
funded her life. But again, she used her privilege
and her platform as a tool, just like she used
a carving knife on a woodblock. That's a great
way to think about it. She was a true polymath
of purpose, a globally recognized portraitist,
a printmaking pioneer, an art critic, and a fierce
boots on the ground activist. And her legacy
is still incredibly visible today. Yes, it is.
If you go to the Canberra suburb of Cook, you
can walk down Teague Street, which is named in
her honor. And her work is still being celebrated
right now. In fact, she is featured in a major
exhibition titled Dangerously Modern. Australian
women artists in Europe 1890 to 1940, which runs
all the way through September 2025 at the Art
Gallery of South Australia. Dangerously modern.
What a perfect encapsulating phrase for her.
Isn't it? She was dangerous to the status quo
precisely because she refused to be categorized.
She just wouldn't stay in the neat little box
society built for her. So what does this all
mean? Why does Violet Teague's story matter to
you listening today? I think her life proves
that true mastery doesn't mean staying in your
lane. Definitely not. We live in a world where
we are constantly told to pick a specialty, to
brand ourselves, to find a niche, and stick to
it forever. It's all about hyper specialization
now. Right. But Teague shows us that you can
master the rigid classical rules of the academy
and still write delicate haikus about rabbits.
You can be the darling of the Parisian elite,
winning silver medals, and still drive a rattling
Ford into the outback to physically build a water
pipeline. It means using your skills, your curiosity,
and whatever privilege you have been handed to
explore the entire world, and crucially, to leave
it tangibly better than you found it. She observed
the world deeply, both the beautiful parts and
the broken parts, and she wasn't afraid to reflect
back the parts of it that made her own society
profoundly uncomfortable. And that leaves us
with a lingering question to mull over. Violet
Teague was considered a radical outlier for stating
truths about colonial occupation in the 1930s,
truths that aggressively challenged the comfortable
mainstream narratives of her day. If an artist's
job is to observe the world and reflect it back
to us, what outlier are artists reflecting today
that our mainstream might still be ignoring.