Janet CUMBRAE STEWART ✿

Janet Agnes Cumbrae Stewart (23 December 1883 – 8 September 1960) was an Australian painter. She was born at Brighton, Victoria, youngest of the ten children of Francis Edward Stewart, an early settler of Gladstone, Queensland, and his wife Agnes, née Park, of Wellington, New Zealand. She spent the 1920s and 1930s painting in Britain, France and Italy. Cumbrae Stewart studied at the Melbourne National Gallery School, where she was taught by Lindsay Bernard Hall and Frederick McCubbin.

Following her art education, Cumbrae Stewart rented premises in Melbourne and commenced exhibiting. She participated in the first Exhibition of Women's Work held in Melbourne in 1907, and exhibited with the Victorian Artists Society from 1908 to 1920. She also exhibited with the Queensland Art Society, the Australian Artists Association and the South Australian Society of Arts, as well as the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors.

She held her first solo exhibition at the Coles Book Arcade gallery in Collins Street in 1911, from which Bernard Hall purchased a pastel of a head, and Rupert Bunny purchased a landscape. Other solo exhibitions were regularly held at the Athenaeum Hall in Melbourne, Gayfield Shaw's Salon in Sydney and Preece's Gallery in South Australia, under the management of Gayfield Shaw.

In 1922 she went to London with her sister Beatrice and began exhibiting at the Galérie Beaux-Arts, Paris (1924-31), the Royal Academy and the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français (the Old Salon), Paris in 1923 she received an honourable mention from the latter. In the same year she travelled through the Continent and to Canada.

During her seventeen-year stay in Europe she lived at Avignon and Caen in France and at Laiguelia on the Riviera di Ponente, Italy, with Miss Argemore ffarington 'Bill' Bellairs, her companion. She returned to Australia in 1939 to visit her family and remained there after the outbreak of World War II.

Cumbrae Stewart devoted the most significant section of her oeuvre to studies of the female nude in pastel. Her nudes were the subject of a monograph by John Shirlow published in Melbourne in 1921. While influenced by the academic draughtsmanship of Bernard Hall, Cumbrae Stewart imparted a sensuous and graceful quality to her rendering of women's bodies. While her oeuvre includes water-colour and oil studies of landscapes and portraits she is chiefly known for use of pastel.