Mabel Hill’s love of early impressionism coloured her opinion of the movements that followed it. Spending her formative years in New Zealand, then marrying and raising a family instead of studying in Europe as some of her contemporaries were able to do, limited her development as an artist. Although she frequently exhibited with most of the art societies in New Zealand, few of her best works have found their way into public collections.
Joel exhibited regularly in France and Great Britain with conservative bodies such as the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Société des artistes français in Paris.
Frances Hodgkins was the outstanding artist of her generation, with a professional life that spanned 56 years and earned her a secure place among the English avant-garde of the 1930s and 1940s: the first New Zealand-born artist to achieve such stature.
Edith Collier exhibited at the Women’s International Art Club show in 1920, and in the same year joined Frances Hodgkins’s classes at St Ives. There she began producing the most comprehensively modern and experimental work of her career.
Muriel Moody’s reputation rests primarily on her ceramic sculptures and some bronzes cast in the 1980s. Her work was original and distinctive, usually based on the human figure.
Butler was well known for her many paintings of the landscape around Ōtira
Hilda Wiseman designed over 100 bookplates, most of them linocuts meticulously printed on her own small handpress.
Prolific and multi-talented, Joanna Paul was one of the most gifted artists of her generation. Intensely responsive to the world around her, she depicted her surroundings, constantly reworking the conventions of drawing and watercolour painting. Paul also documented her environment in photographs and experimental short films, and published poetry, criticism and non-fiction.
Molly Macalister was a passionate advocate for sculpture at a time when very little was made or exhibited in New Zealand. A founding member of the New Zealand Society of Sculptors and Associates (1961) and honorary life member from 1979, she was the prime mover behind the 1971 international sculpture symposium in Auckland.
Elizabeth Lissaman was always helpful to aspiring potters, giving lessons and weekend schools. Her book, Pottery for pleasure in Australia and New Zealand, was published in 1969. She was accorded honorary life membership of the New Zealand Society of Potters in 1965 and was appointed an OBE in 1982 for her services to pottery.