14 Facts About Clara Southern

Clara Southern was an Australian artist associated with the Heidelberg School, known as Australian Impressionism.

Clara Southern was active between the years 1883 and her death in 1940.

Physically, Southern was tall with reddish fair hair, and was nicknamed 'Panther' because of her lithe beauty.

Clara Southern was born in Kyneton, Victoria, in 1860, the eldest of six children.

Clara Southern was the daughter of local timber merchant and farmer John Southern and Jane Elliott.

From 1883 to 1887, Clara Southern studied at the School of Design, National Gallery of Victoria under Oswald Rose Campbell and at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School under George Folingsby and Frederick McCubbin.

Clara Southern is credited by some as 'among the first women to be elected' to it in 1886, though several other female artists were already members, and amateur poet and painter Alice Brotherton had been the first woman elected to the Club in 1883, followed by several other important women artists such as Jane Sutherland and May Vale, who both joined in 1884.

Clara Southern was a member of the Victorian Artists Society, the Australian Art Association, the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors, the Twenty Melbourne Painters, and the Lyceum Club.

When in Melbourne Clara Southern shared a studio at Grosvenor Chambers, 9 Collins Street, with Jane Sutherland and Tom Roberts from 1888.

Clara Southern taught art classes from her studio, and regularly joined her Heidelberg School colleagues on plein air painting trips to Heidelberg and Eaglemont.

On 9 November 1905, Clara Southern married local miner John Arthur Flinn at St John's Anglican Church in Blackburn.

Clara Southern was supportive of charity and relief efforts, supporting Violet Teague and her sister Una in an exhibition for the Hermannsburg Mission Water Supply in Central Australia.

Miss Clara Southern is a sweet and original singer of the Australian bush in colour, which, by the most skilful use of her pigments, she realises in all its beauty and charm, its majestic silences, its harmonies, and those mysterious distances we all know and feel when in its midst.

Clara Southern's landscapes are truly poems, full of sentiment and feeling, and that artistic reticence so seldom met with, which never allows nature to be for one moment oppressed or overstepped, or the note forced under any pretence.