Self portrait

Jean Appleton, painter, studied at the East Sydney Technical College before proceeding, via cargo ship, to London in 1935 for further studies at the Westminster School. In London, she was part of the group of young Australian artists, including William Dobell, Donald Friend and Arthur Murch, who worked on a mural for the Wool Secretariat pavilion at the 1938 Empire Exhibition in Glasgow. With the outbreak of war she returned to Australia, thereafter teaching at high schools in the ACT and NSW and at the Julian Ashton and National Art Schools in Sydney. The first of her thirteen solo exhibitions was held at Sydney’s Macquarie Galleries in 1940. Resident in England from 1969 to 1981, she continued to teach intermittently into the late 1970s. After a difficult first marriage to artist Eric Wilson, who died, she married painter Tom Green and they settled in Moss Vale. Though her work is now represented in major state and regional collections, Appleton was like many women artists of her generation in that recognition of her work came late in life: she was in her eighties when a public gallery first presented a retrospective exhibition of her art.

Jean Appleton won the inaugural Portia Geach Memorial Award in 1965 with this work.

Gift of the Estate of Nicolaas van der Waarden 2013
© Estate of Jean Appleton