Pegg Clarke claimed to be some seven years younger than Dora L Wilson, her lifelong companion, who was born in 1883.
17 Facts About Pegg Clarke
1.
2.
Pegg Clarke had an early win with a picture Minnie in the October 1915 Australasian photo-review Home Portraiture Competition.
3.
Pegg Clarke's work featured in prominent early 20th century Australian magazines, at first in thumbnail portraits for The Bulletin.
4.
Pegg Clarke provided photographic reproductions of her friend Dora Wilson's paintings to the press.
5.
The couple, usually Pegg Clarke, corresponded regularly to the Australian press, sending lively descriptions of their adventures touring by car to avoid the cost of rail travel and staying in barns in England, and traveling cheaply by boat, train or horse-cart in often remote parts of France, Spain, Italy, Sardinia, Corsica, Belgium and Germany.
6.
In June 1936 Wilson and Pegg Clarke spent a week together in Sydney sketching and photographing and made a leisurely few days on the journey back to make more pictures.
7.
Pegg Clarke had earlier portrayed, probably for a similar event, L Bernard Hall, then director the National Gallery of Victoria, dressed as an Italian Nobleman.
8.
Pegg Clarke's pictures were reproduced in a double-page spread in Home magazine.
9.
Unlike her friends Pegg Clarke was not trained at the National Gallery School, though she drew as well as photographed, but was involved with the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors.
10.
Pegg Clarke did not join the Melbourne Camera Club as Hollick and Izard had, nor any other formal Pictorialist group.
11.
Pegg Clarke did however come to know, and portray, prominent artists of the period, including Jessie Traill, one of Australia's most important 20th century printmakers who in 1909, moved to a studio in Temple Court, an arcade off Collins Street in Melbourne, occupied by Janet Cumbrae Stewart, Nora Gurdon and AM E Bale, and where she may have first met Dora Wilson.
12.
Pegg Clarke won awards at the All-Australian Peace Exhibition, Adelaide, beside Monte Luke, as announced in the May 1920 Australasian photo-review.
13.
Pegg Clarke's work was included in a London Salon exhibition of the Royal Photographic Society in 1921, and Director of the Pittsburg USA Salon of Photography included three of her platinum prints of Australian landscape in their annual Exhibition.
14.
Pegg Clarke has made of photography a consummate art.
15.
Pegg Clarke showed in a group exhibition at Geelong Art Gallery in July 1922 and in 1923 she exhibited in a Colonial Prints Exhibition run by the English magazine, Amateur Photographer.
16.
Miss Pegg Clarke has an eye for something other than the merely picturesque, and most of our painters might study the composition of these carefully-selected subjects with profit.
17.
Miss Pegg Clarke has the good fortune to have a natural instinct for this, coupled with the necessary technical knowledge required for the ultimate results.