Nancy Menetrey (née Wilkinson) (1924-2024) was born in Sydney in 1924. After serving with the Australian Women's Land Army, formed during the Second World War to address labour shortages in the agricultural sector, she travelled overseas in the early 1950s, living and working in London for a number of years. She returned to Australia with her Swiss fiancé, Phillipe Gabriel Menetrey, who she married in Rockdale, Sydney, in 1956. Largely self-taught as an artist, Menetrey became a member of the (selective) St George Art Society in the 1950s, and is thought to be the first woman accepted into its ranks.
Under her married name she entered the Archibald Prize in 1957 with the portrait of her colleague, photographer Noel Fraser Hickey; and in 1958 with a painting of Pat Woodley, model and former Miss New South Wales and Miss Australia. The painting of Hickey was among the 69 works selected for the 1957 Archibald exhibition. Menetrey left Australia again in 1958 and spent the next decade living in Canada and Switzerland. After returning to Sydney in 1969, she held the occasional solo exhibition and exhibited in a number of group shows, including the Portia Geach Memorial Award several times in the 1970s. She was president of the Kuring-Gai Art Society from 1979 to 1981. Among Menetrey's other portrait subjects were Rita Young (née Lee), who modelled for artists such as Norman Lindsay, Rah Fizelle, Max Dupain and Kerry Dundas in the 1930s and 1940s; and author and conservationist Mary Edgeworth David, the daughter of the Antarctic explorer and eminent geologist Sir Tannatt William Edgeworth David. In the 1970s she painted a commissioned portrait of Admiral Sir Victor Smith (1913–1998), former Chief of Navy, which is on display at HMAS Albatross in Nowra.
