Rosa Fiveash becomes botanical illustrator for top South Australian naturalists; pioneers Adelaide china painting
Rose Fiveash and the products of her main love: painting flowers. She also pioneered china painting in Adelaide.
Images courtesy State Library of South Australia
Rosa Fiveash has been described as the foremost Australian botanical artist of the late 19th century and into the 20th.
Born in 1854 in Adelaide, she was youngest child of Margaret and Robert Fiveash. He was a businessman and superintendent of the Blinman and Yudanamutana copper-mines.
Rosa Fiveash was trained by painter Ann-Marie Benham and at the Adelaide School of Art and Design in 1881-88; later in private lessons and at Tormore House School, North Adelaide, for many years.
In 1882, Fiveash was invited to illustrate The Forest Flora of South Australia by forest conservator John Ednie Brown. Nine parts of this work, never completed, were published in 1882-90. Each one contained five attractive lithographs of native plants and Rosa drew 32 – as specimens arrived, in no particular botanical order – of the 45 published. Fiveash was increasingly sought as a versatile illustrator of scientific papers.
Fiveash provided seven of the coloured plates for Edward Stirling’s description in 1891 of the newly discovered marsupial mole, as well as 322 clear and bright illustrations of toas (Aboriginal direction signs), for a later paper by Stirling and E.R. Waite.
Fiveash pioneered china painting in Adelaide, attending to all stages, including firing. Her main love was flower painting. Her portfolio so impressed the governor Lord Tennyson and Robert Barr Smith that they bought them in 1900 as a gift to the colony.
She collaborated with Dr. R. S. Rogers for 30 years, illustrating his publications on orchids, including his section on them in J.M. Black’s Flora of South Australia Part I (second edition). Fiveash would wait for weeks for a rare orchid bud to open fully before recording it.
Apart from two years overseas, Rosa lived all her life in the family home, Gable House, North Adelaide, with her sister. They were both unmarried and devout Anglicans. Rosa Fiveash worked steadily until failing eyesight stopped her four years before she died. In 1937 she presented many of her paintings to the Public Library of South Australia.
Most of her life's work—beautifully drawn flower portraits in glowing watercolours—went to the State Library and the South Australian Museum. Australian Orchids, a book of her pictures from the museum collection, edited by Noel Lothian, was published in Adelaide in 1974. It showed her ability to capture the beauty of a flower without departing from botanical accuracy.
