Maude Prosser's craft, needlework expertise turned into independent business in early 20th Century Adelaide city
Maude Prosser in the early 1900s. Advertising her first Adelaide city craft business (top left) and later confidently placing her work (top right) alongside imported lines from London and Paris. Examples of her wide range of craftwork (anti clockwise from left): embroidery on tissue paper; her In a Fayre Garden needlework screen; leatherwork and an embroidered hanging; metal relief block engraved for an invitation or other card.
Images from Bridget Jolly Research project, courtesy Mary Rawlings
Maude Prosser translated her leading expertise in needlework and other crafts into becoming a successful independent business woman around Adelaide city in the early 20th Century.
Prosser, born in 1876 as eldest of seven children, left her public school at 14 and, two years later, in 1892, entered Adelaide’s School of Design, Painting, and Technical Art. She could only afford two art lessons a week until school director H.P. Gill (later School of Arts and Crafts principal) entrusted her with paid work in needlework designs. She eventually attended classes full-time, hoping to be an accomplished watercolour painter but realised her “limitations”.
Taught art needlework (a school subject from 1886), mainly by Miss E.H. Meek, Prosser was the sole student successfully examined for the art class teacher’s certificate in 1897. Next year, she became the school of design art needlework teacher and succeeded Meek as superintendent of art needlework from 1901. Prosser was one of the women who embroidered the 1901 large presentation portière, considered “the finest piece of art needlework ever executed in South Australia” and presented to the duchess of Cornwall and York during Australian federation ceremonies in Adelaide. The displays from 1903 of school of design students’ work in the Exhibition Building on North Terrace, Adelaide city, were considered of “a very high character”
In the 1903 School of Design Art Club Magazine, Prosser stressed that needlework “must be studied independently of any connection with painting, architecture or sculpture”, with design essential; “educated powers, thoughtfulness and study” were crucial for superior work. Prosser led an Australian aversion to the “lifeless regularity” of “machine-made art” and kept alive the sentiments of William Morris and other English arts and crafts practitioners.
In 1907, Prosser resigned from the school of design and opened her private business venture, the “Sole depot in South Australia for Liberty and Co., Limited’s, London and Paris fabrics and wares" in Gawler Place – the first of a series of Adelaide city business spaces she used. In 1917, Prosser exhibited at Stephens Place, opposite the Queen Adelaide Club, and, for an exhibition in Commercial Bank Chambers, she showed stencilling, poker and repoussé work, preferring Australian flora, and a bedspread of silver-grey Liberty art fabric worked in pink and green. Later, the press highlighted her retailing, at Haigh’s Buildings in Rundle Street, of the “fascinating” Spanish shawls newly in vogue.
In 1920, Prosser exhibited “art goods” – hand-tooled leather and art needlework – in the window of her brother Percival’s manufacturing jeweller and watchmaker shop in King William Street. Prosser was a judge of the large section of “fancy and plain needlework, lace etc” at Adelaide’s 1920 Peace Exhibition.
Prosser returned to part-time teaching at the school of design and the 1922 annual exhibition showed “captivating specimens” of work by her students. Prosser’s own work attracted lavish acclaim: “Delicacy of thought permeated a lovely handkerchief and glove set, which featured a gum design on Morris silk embodying the palest of coloured shades”. Along with her own bewildering array of specialities, in the 1920s, Prosser imported voiles from Paris, and her lingerie, night gowns and camisoles were modelled on Parisian lines.
Prosser's work attracted equal attention in 1922 when part of a retrospective exhibition of paintings by her school of design mentor H.P. Gill. Her In the Garden Fayre embroidery, at the 1935 autumn South Australian Society of Arts exhibition, was bought for the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Prosser independently resisted calls to move interstate. In South Australia’s 1936 centennial show, in the Colonial Mutual Building, King William Street, Prosser students’ needlework was praised for its “most artistic and useful forms”. Prosser also still had her own business space in the Martin Buildings, on Rundle Street between Twin and Pulteney streets.
