Isobel Rae was an Australian-born impressionist painter who lived and worked most of her life in Europe.
16 Facts About Iso Rae
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Iso Rae was born on 18 August 1860 in Melbourne, youngest daughter of Scottish emigrants Thomas Iso Rae, a manufacturer and later a state politician, and his wife Janet Love.
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Iso Rae was the granddaughter of the Reverend Andrew Love and Catherine Love of Geelong, Victoria, Australia.
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Iso Rae studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School from 1877 to 1887, where fellow students included Rupert Bunny and John Longstaff.
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Iso Rae's teachers included George Folingsby and Oswald Rose Campbell.
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Iso Rae joined, and exhibited with, the Victorian Academy of Arts between 1881 and 1883.
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In 1887, Rae travelled to France and settled in Paris with her mother Janet and sister Alison.
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Iso Rae's works were sometimes of everyday scenes: she won third prize in her graduating year with a painting "of a Chinese hawker displaying his wares to two girls standing at a kitchen door", while two decades later exhibited in Australia a picture of a working-class girl carting water at dusk.
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Iso Rae had works hung on many occasions, always in what was referred to as the New Salon, including 1908,1909,1910,1911,1912,1913, and 1914.
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When World War I broke out some Australians, such as Rix Nicholas, fled to England, however Iso Rae stayed and became, along with Jessie Traill, one of only two Australian women artists to portray the war while living in France.
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When in 1918 Australia first appointed official war artists, sixteen men were chosen; Iso Rae, despite having lived in France for the duration of the conflict, was not included.
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Iso Rae nevertheless documented prolifically the experience of the war in her adopted home town, creating over two hundred drawings.
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Iso Rae observed the influence of the post-impressionist movement to which Rae was exposed when first she came to France, and her attention to the regimentation and tensions of camp life.
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Iso Rae died on 16 March 1940 at Brighton Mental Hospital in Brighton.
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Iso Rae was criticised for allowing her impressionist style to become extreme and visually distracting from her subjects, but that same approach was seen by another critic as charming, and exhibiting "harmonious colour and vigorous effects".
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Nevertheless, the secondary market for Iso Rae's works has been relatively strong, with one work selling in 2012 for 10,000 Euros, as against a pre-auction estimate of two-thirds that sum.