Janet Agnes Cumbrae Stewart (1883-1960), artist, was born on 23 December
1883 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. The Stewarts had arrived in
Victoria from New Zealand in 1870; Francis was chief inspector for the
National Bank in Melbourne before becoming general manager of Goldsbrough, Mort
& Co. Ltd, resigning in 1891. He was then chairman and managing
director of Younghusband, Row & Co. Pty Ltd until his death in 1904.
Janet followed her brother, Francis William Sutton, in adopting the surname Cumbrae-Stewart.
Janet grew up in the family home, Montrose, at Brighton Beach. She went on outdoor sketching trips with John Mather before studying at the Melbourne National Gallery School in 1901-07 under Bernard Hall and F. McCubbin.
In 1905 she was awarded second place in the National Gallery travelling
scholarship competition. Elected to the council of the Victorian
Artists' Society in 1914 she exhibited regularly with the society in
1909-19. In 1915 she was awarded a silver medal in the Panama-Pacific
International Exposition, San Francisco. Between 1920 and 1937 several
exhibitions of her work were held at the Athenaeum Gallery, Melbourne,
as well as in Adelaide and Sydney.
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. She lived at Margaret Street, South Yarra, from 1947 until her
death on 8 September 1960. Her estate was valued for probate at £13,143.
Cumbrae Stewart (she dispensed with the hyphen and signed her work in this manner) 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.
