Thesis title: Women of Empire: British-Australian Women Artists and the transnational experience, 1885 – 1907.

Supervisors: Dr Chaitanya Sambrani, Dr. Keren Hammerschlag

Were there so few ‘great’ women artists in England in the late nineteenth century as the Victorian-era art critic John Ruskin supposes in the quote above? Likewise, in Australia were women artists equally as invisible in Victorian and Edwardian society, as concluded by the Marxist art historian Bernard Smith eighty-seven years later? This thesis is preoccupied with these questions because not only does this preconception endure in traditional approaches to art history, but ’greatness’ and ‘invisibility’ are foundational concepts in key feminist texts.