14 Facts About Polly Hurry

Polly Hurry was a founding member of the Australian Tonalist movement and part of the Twenty Melbourne Painters Society.

Polly Hurry spent her early years there at the family home South Lodge, 29 Donnithorne Street, then was educated at Ruyton Girls' School, Kew.

Later, at the Kyneton School of Mines, Hurry took lessons in drawing and wood carving, then studied watercolour painting with the Scottish-born artist, John Mather.

Polly Hurry began drawing from life at Melbourne's 1859 Old Temple Court building where studios were occupied by students of Frederick McCubbin; Jessie Traill, Dora Wilson, Janet Cumbrae Stewart, Norah Gurdon and AME Bale; before approaching Meldrum to join his studio as one of the first of his pupils, alongside Harry McClelland.

Polly Hurry regarded Meldrum as the most important influence on her artistic development, but the association shaped her personal life; in Meldrum's studio she met John Farmer whom she married on 13 August 1921.

Also in 1921, Polly Hurry entered the inaugural Archibald Prize, in which 41 works were submitted and all exhibited from 17 January 1922 for two months.

The Prize was awarded to WB McInnes, but no catalogue for the 1921 exhibition has been found, and the subject of the work submitted by Polly Hurry is not known.

Polly Hurry painted two copies after Velasquez in the Louvre over February to May 1924.

Polly Hurry made it available to the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors as their volunteer headquarters in which they made and sold handcrafts, fashion and art to raise money for the war effort and learned and practised first aid drills, as documented by Sybil Craig's gouache in the National Gallery of Australia.

Polly Hurry concentrated on portraiture and still life, and earlier in her career painted some landscapes, all of which attracted commentary and criticism.

One of Polly Hurry's more celebrated subjects, in a portrait held in the Castlemaine Art Museum, is the German-Jewish scholar Ursula Hoff, who migrated to Melbourne in 1939 as the first individual with professional qualifications in art history and curatorship to be employed in an art gallery or museum in Australia, working at the National Gallery of Victoria for thirty years.

For health reasons Polly Hurry moved from Olinda to Frankston in 1954, where she died 5 August, 1963, at 80 years old, survived by Farmer, who was 14 years her junior, and her brother Maurice, a solicitor in Kyneton.

Polly Hurry was a foundation member of the Twenty Melbourne Painters, exhibited with them from 1919 to 1963 and was made a life member in 1961.

Polly Hurry exhibited with the Victorian Artists' Society from 1961 until the late 1930s, and with the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors from 1927 to 1962.