Grace Joel
Grace Joel: Artist
Grace Joel
Dunedin Jewish pioneer, Maurice Joel (1829- ?) not only presided over the consecration of Dunedin’s first synagogue but was elected chairman of the Dunedin City Council. A cousin of Julius Vogel, (their mothers were sisters), he was born in England and an engraver by trade. In 1853, he moved to Ballarat and worked as a gold buyer. Transferring to Dunedin in 1861, he opened a general hardware store and ship chandlery. In 1864, he advanced his business interests by purchasing the Red Lion Brewer. That same year, he became a member of the Otago Harbour Board and a committee member for the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition of 1889 and 1890. In 1869, he married Catherine Woolf. They had six children – the most famous being Grace Joel (1865-1924) one of New Zealand’s foremost portrait painters.
At twenty-one, Grace Joel became a working member of the Otago Art Society. In June 1888, she enrolled at the National Gallery School of Design in Melbourne where she studied between 1888-89 and 1891-1894. “She was probably attracted to the Melbourne school's single-minded commitment to fine arts in contrast with the Otago School of Art's more diverse responsibilities, which embraced both fine arts and technical drawing.”[1] In 1889, at the end-of-year Exhibition, she won equal prize in drawing by charcoal by a first-year student.[2] After spending a year with her family in Dunedin, Grace continued her art studies in Melbourne in early 1891. “Her most important formal achievement was winning the Ramsay Prize for painting from the nude in 1893. She was the first woman to win this prestigious prize, and, indeed, the first woman in the history of the school to win any of the major awards it offered.”[3]
‘Portrait of a young girl’, Grace Joel, c 1894
Oil on canvas
Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki
‘Girl with a scarf’, Grace Joel, c 1896
Oil on canvas
Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki
‘Mother and child’, Grace Joel, 1904
Oil on canvas
Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki
‘A rose ‘midst poppies’, Grace Joel, 1895
Christchurch Art Gallery, Te Puna o Waiwhetū
‘Wearing a hat’, Grace Joel self portrait
Joel returned to Dunedin in July 1894 where she struggled to establish herself as a professional artist, “exhibiting, teaching and sharing in the life of the local art establishment, notably the Otago Art Society and the short-lived Easel Club”.[4] She concentrated on her talent for portraits and the figure. It was assumed for many years that she was following the Italian impressionist painter and instructor Signor Girolami Nerli who had traveled from Melbourne to New Zealand in 1889 to help set up the New South Wales loan to the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition. It is part of Joel family lore that Grace had an affair with Nerli that both transformed and disrupted her life. Though their peripatetic wanderings were strangely parallel, their acquaintance has never been proven.
Grace Joel left Dunedin around 1890, settling in London but working and studying in France and the Netherlands. Some peasant genre scenes date from this period; but unlike fellow Dunedin expatriate Frances Hodgkins, she had no interest in the landscape. Her prime concern remained the figure.[5] During this time, she enrolled at the Academie Julian in Paris, studying with many esteemed artists including Auguste Renoir. Though she briefly returned to New Zealand in 1906, she remained in London where she became an active member of the Australian expatriate community. As her stylistic development progressed, her work showed the heavy influence of the plein-airism advocated in Melbourne and the Impressionist palette introduced by the Australian painter Phillips Fox, who was also Jewish. In Europe, another of her artistic influences was Dutch artist Josef Israels, (who was also Jewish), whom Joel met during her travels to Holland in 1904.[6]
For many years Grace Joel’s work was not as well known in New Zealand as her contemporary, Frances Hodgkins. Now she is recognized as one of New Zealand’s greatest painters but her life and career continue to be veiled in mystery. A recent exhibition at the Otago Settlers Museum, “Portrait of a People, the Southernmost Jewish Congregation in the World,” included one of Joel’s oil studies of a young girl holding a bouquet of flowers, “Harmony in Blue and Yellow.” A study of a seated nude with flowing Edwardian-styled hair was discovered on the reverse of its better-known portrait, eliciting the late Peter Entwistle’s speculation as to “why Miss Joel would have discarded the nude, especially since she had made painting the nude a specialty”.[7]
[1]R. D. J. Collins. 'Joel, Grace Jane', Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 1993. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2j3/joel-grace-jane
[2] Kirsten Fergusson, Grace Joel (1865-1924) A Reassessment, Art New Zealand, v. 70, p.86
[3] Fergusson, Grace Joel, A Reassessment, Art New Zealand, v. 70, p.86
[4]R. D. J. Collins. 'Joel, Grace Jane', Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 1993. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2j3/joel-grace-jane
[5]R. D. J. Collins. 'Joel, Grace Jane', Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 1993. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2j3/joel-grace-jane
[6] Fergusson, Grace Joel, A Reassessment, Art New Zealand, v. 70, p. 88
[7] Peter Entwistle, “Surprise Discovery Ignites the Search for Naked Truth,” The Otago Daily Times, 26 February 2007.