Self portrait

Bess Norriss Tait, artist, was born in Melbourne and had her first art lessons, aged ten, from the landscape painter, Jane Sutherland. Between 1897 and 1901 she studied at the National Gallery School and began exhibiting with the Victorian Art Society. At the instigation of a patron, she sent examples of her miniatures to a London expert, who encouraged her to further her career in England. In London from 1905, she studied at the Slade School, became a member of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters and in 1908 achieved the first of her many inclusions in exhibitions such as those of the Royal Academy and the New Salon, Paris. She married Australian theatre entrepreneur James Nevin Tait in London in 1908 and through him developed associations with the community of creative Australian expats that included Percy Grainger, Nellie Melba and Ada Crossley. She returned to Australia briefly in 1910, completing a number of portrait commissions here and holding exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne from which works were acquired by the National Galleries of Victoria and New South Wales. She returned to London in 1911 and settled in Chelsea, where she died in January 1939.

Purchased with funds provided by Barbara and Jim Higgins 2010