Georgina ‘Ina’ Gregory (1874-1964) grew up with her sister Ada at Rosedale, her family home in East St Kilda. Their mother was domineering, but in spite of her, Ina attended the NGV school for five years in the 1880s, and later classes run by Emanuel Phillips Fox and Tudor St George Tucker at Charterisville and the Melbourne School of Art. A portraitist who came to specialise in landscapes and garden views, she exhibited from 1898 to 1912 with the Victorian Artists’ Society. For some years she and her sister Ada lived together at the back of Rosedale, in relative seclusion; they believed in karma, and aimed at ‘a life intellectual and emotional, lifted far above the materiality of an average existence.’ By 1908, according to some accounts, she was practically nocturnal. She wrote a novel, Blue Wings, evoking her life as a student at the Melbourne School. From 1938 to 1948 Gregory and a fellow painter, Jane Price, lived together at Rosedale. After Price died, Gregory was attended by a paid companion, who shared her unorthodox spiritual outlook.
