Adelaide Ironside - Infinite Women

Born: 17 November 1831, Australia
Died: 15 April 1867
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: NA

The following is republished with permission from the Victorian Honour Roll of Women.

Adelaide Ironside was said to be the first Australian artist to study abroad.

Adelaide Ironside was born in Sydney on 17 November 1831. Her father, James Ironside, was a commission agent and she was educated, including artistically, by her mother, Martha Rebecca (nee Redman). Adelaide wrote patriotic prose and verse for the Sydney press and in 1855 designed a large banner for the First Volunteer Artillery Company of New South Wales. She also exhibited at the 1854 preparatory Australian Museum Exhibition for the Paris Universal Exhibition.

The next year her ‘Drawings of native wild flowers’ received honourable mentions in Paris. In 1855, Adelaide sailed with her mother to Europe to study art and met painter Joseph Severn and critic John Ruskin. In 1856, she set up in Rome and after many difficulties established a reputation with a large oil painting ‘The Pilgrim of Art, Crowned by the Genius of Art’ (1859). The ‘pilgrim’ in the painting was Adelaide herself, while the ‘genius of art’ was a portrait of her mother. In 1861, a private audience with Pope Pius IX enabled her to study in Perugia and to copy works in the papal collections. In 1862, her oil painting ‘The Marriage at Cana in Gallilee’ was exhibited in the London International Exhibition, in the New South Wales court, while ‘The Pilgrim of Art’ was shown in the Rome court. In the same year, she became a member of the Accademia dei Quiriti in Rome and was awarded its diploma. Adelaide died in Rome, of tuberculosis in 1867.

Although she gained recognition for her work in Italy and England, she was never popular in Australia. Her ambition to fresco the walls of the Great Hall of the University of Sydney was never fulfilled. Her surviving works are mainly portraits. Throughout her life, Adelaide remained a committed republican and held anti-papal views – in her oil painting ‘The Marriage at Cana’ she modelled the heads of both Christ and the bridegroom on Garibaldi.

The following is excerpted from The Dictionary of Australian Biography by Percival Searle, published in 1949 by Angus and Robertson and republished by Project Gutenberg.

IRONSIDE, ADELAIDE ELIZA (1831-1867), painter, was born in Sydney on 17 November 1831. From a child she showed literary ability, contributing to the press both in prose and verse. In 1855 she decided to study painting in Europe, and towards the end of that year went with her mother to London. She had a letter of introduction to Sir James Clark, through whom she met Ruskin who showed much interest in her work. From London she went to Rome and remained there for the rest of her life. In 1862 she was represented in the New South Wales court of the London exhibition, and her two pictures received good notices from the critics. In Rome she had an excellent reputation as a painter, at the time of her death a fellow artist spoke of her flowers “painted as never were flowers painted before . . . her rich Titian-like colouring united to a purity of feeling that recalled the visions of Beato Angelico”. She sold paintings to among others the Prince of Wales and W. C. Wentworth (q.v.), but she was of a delicate constitution and died at Rome at the age of 35 on 15 April 1867. Good as her reputation was in Rome she was soon forgotten in her native country, and no specimen of her work is in any of its national galleries. Three of her pictures, “The Pilgrim of Art”, “The Marriage in Cana”, and “The Presentation of the Magi” were sent to Australia and lent to the national gallery at Sydney, where Francis Adams (q.v.) found them about 1888 stored “in a sort of shed” as there was “not room enough in the gallery”. Adams praised them highly, and suggested that room might be found in the Melbourne gallery by taking out three by Folingsby (q.v.), and putting Miss Ironside’s pictures in their place. They eventually found a home in the dining hall of St Paul’s College, Sydney university.