James Ashton profound Adelaide art educator with Norwood school, city academy, 40 years at Prince Alfred College
Adelaide art educator James Ashton and one of his own many seascapes: The moon enchanted sea (1910).
Images courtesy State Library of South Australia and the Art Gallery of South Australia
James Ashton had a profound influence on 19th Century Adelaide art education, with his Norwood school (from 1886), Ashton's Academy of Arts in Victoria Square from 1896, and 40 years as art teacher at Prince Alfred College.
Through his highly regarded academy, “Jimmy” influenced many painters, including Hans Heysen, Ivor Hele, Richard Hayley Lever, Frank White, Gustave Barnes, Arthur Baker-Clack and his son Will Ashton.
Ashton grew up in the English city of York where he was apprenticed to a pharmacist and attended the school of art before gaining a scholarship to the National Art Training School (Royal College of Art) at South Kensington, London. At 17, he returned to York, taught art and worked as a gilder and carver.
Ashton arrived in Adelaide in 1884 and decided to become a professional artist. He spent 12 months looking for work before a job teaching art at Prince Alfred College enabled him to bring out his wife and son. He started the Norwood Art School in 1886 in two cramped rooms of Norwood Town Hall where he taught sketching, china painting and painting in oil and water colours.
In 1895, he returned to England and paid £240 for three months lessons from eminent marine painter Henry Moore at York. He gained a diploma and was elected a member of the (Royal) Society of Arts, London.
Ashton was affiliated with the Royal Drawing Society and, after returning to Adelaide via Europe and Egypt, instituted examinations and much-prized certificates at Ashton's Academy of Arts, opened in Victoria Square in 1896. It later moved to Flinders Street, then Grenfell Street. Ashton insisted on basic proficiency in drawing.
His association with Prince Alfred College lasted nearly 40 years. A jovial popular teacher, he allowed the boys to develop their interests but encouraged them to copy early masters. In 1925, he presented the school with a valuable art collection and he bequeathed it his library.
Ashton presided in 1896 over the Adelaide Easel Club, a group of rebels dissatisfied with Adelaide's art establishment. In 1912-14, he was a member of the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board. A trustee and honorary fellow of the South Australian Society of Arts, he was its president in 1914-17 and vice-president in 1931; in 1926 and 1929 he won the society's seascape prize. He encouraged six South Australian country towns to begin art collections and his own paintings were bought by galleries in Broken Hill, Bendigo, Perth and Colombo.
In 1927, Ashton, a tubby figure with silver hair and waxed moustache, who usually wore a flower in his lapel, retired to live by the sea at the Adelaide suburb of Brighton. Between nine trips to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and despite arthritis, he continued painting his favourite subject: the sea.
