AustLit

'This book is a lively read about four women who had independent and active careers from the end of the nineteenth century up to the outbreak of the Second World War. Three of four subjects, Dora Ohlfsen, Clarice Zander and Mary Cecil Allen, tend to not feature in the more standard accounts of modern Australian art, while Louise Dyer’s career in the performing arts has similarly been little acknowledged. Each of these modern women headed overseas; all four, we are told, “shared Melba’s international outlook. Art was their ticket to escape from the confining conventions. Their means to join a diaspora of ability that knew no national boundaries” (vii). Their mobility led the authors to draw on international archives and those in Australia to piece together their remarkable lives.' (Introduction)

'The prominent Australian artist Nora Heysen has been said to have worked in the shadow of her father Hans Heysen, one of Australia's most recognised landscape painters. Letters between the two, however, reveal a different story.

'In 1934, when Nora first travelled to London to study art, she experienced her first time away from home and the first of many, often exotic places from where she would write home to Hahndorf, South Australia. The correspondence between Nora and Hans continued until his death in 1968. Theirs was a close and affectionate relationship, in which father and daughter shared a lifetime of thoughts about art and life, and a mutual admiration and respect for each other's work.

'Heysen to Heysen is a showcase of letters between Nora and Hans Heysen from the collection of the National Library of Australia. Accompanied by carefully selected images and text by leading art historian Catherine Speck, the publication lifts the lid on a vista of Australian art.' (From the publisher's website.)