Marie Tuck becomes an Adelaide art educator after being unable to return as an artist to her beloved France
A Marie Tuck self portrait and her oil on board Church service in Brittany, from her years in France.
Main image courtesy Elder Art
Marie Tuck became a dedicated art educator in Adelaide when she was being unable to return to her beloved France after World War I.
Born at Mount Torrens in the Adelaide Hills in 1866, Tuck received a liberal education, like her three sisters and four brothers, at her schoolteacher father’s local school.
From 1886, she gained arts training from night classes at James Ashton’s Norwood studio and at his Adelaide Academy of Arts in Adelaide city. She worked at a Payneham plant nursery and helped Ashton to pay for her tuition while saving for her ambition to study in Paris. She was an early member of the rebel Adelaide Easel Club, led by Ashton.
In 1896, Tuck moved to Perth and worked for 10 years giving private tuition, working at a photographer's studio and then as Perth Art School principal, before she sailed on the Runic to Paris. She studied in Paris under expatriate Australian Ruper Bunny, paying for his lessons by cleaning his studio, fuelling the stoves and sweeping snow from the door.
Tuck spent summers in Brittany, painting village life. In 1908, she sent a huge painting The fish market to Adelaide for the 11th federal exhibition of the (Royal) South Australian Society of Arts. The National Gallery of South Australia bought it for 100 guineas. That year she exhibited Les Commères and Fishwife at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français in Paris. Her work was hung in the next four salon showings and in 1911 she received an honourable mention for her Toilette de la Mariée, later in the Queen Adelaide Club.
Having developed a great love of French people and culture, Tuck made areturn trip to Australia in 1914, departing from Liverpool on June 17 on the steamship Medic. On August 3, Germany declared war on France. Arriving back in Adelaide four days later, Tuck said if she’s known about the outbreak of war, she would have stayed in France.
Tuck rejoined the Adelaide artistic community, started exhibiting (impressionistic landscapes, figures, portraits in oils) and teaching at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts. Her many students included Ivor Hele, Dora Cecil Chapman, Noel Wood and John Dowie. She insisted on nude models; her natural dignity and authority ensuring her request was accepted.
Still frugal, Tuck built a small live-in studio and garden at Frewville where students gathered on Saturdays to eat nasturtium-leaf sandwiches, drink mulberry wine and talk about Paris. Her 1920 exhibition was criticised by The Bulletin for including slapdash pictures but her plein air work was praised by The Advertiser at her 1924 and 1933 exhibitions.
Tuck continued to teach (until 1939), to paint portraits and do large religious works, including those for Reims Cathedral, France. She loved music and owned a silver-stringed spinet. Although unmarried, Marie Tuck regarded brides as “those fortunate ones”. When France fell in 1940 she had a stroke, but continued to paint, with difficulty, until she died in 1947 at Glen Osmond.
