Background
Horace Hurtle Trenerry was born on December 5, 1899 in Adelaide, Australia. He was the second of five children of Horace Trenerry, a butcher, and his wife Florence Mary (Pridmore) Trenerry.
117 George St, The Rocks NSW 2000, Australia
In 1922 Trenerry attended Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney for a few months and met Elioth Gruner who influenced him.
Horace Hurtle Trenerry was born on December 5, 1899 in Adelaide, Australia. He was the second of five children of Horace Trenerry, a butcher, and his wife Florence Mary (Pridmore) Trenerry.
Horace Trenerry studied at various private art schools and briefly at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts.
Having left school, Horace Trenerry lived with an aunt who encouraged his artistic interests and provided his first studio. He worked for F. H. Faulding & Co., bottling cough mixture, but studied drawing at night-classes and went sketching on the weekends; Trenerry then joined a group who met at Arthur Milbank's studio where he learned the rudiments of painting.
In 1922 Trenerry attended Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney for a few months and met Elioth Gruner who influenced him.
Horace Trenerry began his career in the early 1920s with regular exhibitions and sales, and later he joined Archibald Collins's studio at the Royal Exchange Building. Trenerry had first exhibited at the Federal Exhibition of the (Royal) South Australian Society of Arts in 1918, showing four still-life paintings.
In 1922-1923 Trenerry made one of his rare excursions interstate, staying for 12-18 months in Sydney, where he studied at the Julian Ashton School and became friends with Elioth Gruner. However, it was the influence of Heysen - in whose footsteps Trenerry followed with a painting expedition to the Flinders Ranges in 1930 - out of which his unique vision evolved.
Shortly after this trip he discovered the south coast region of Aldinga and Port Willunga, where during the 1930s his painterly language, allied with a gypsy-like existence among plains, hills, dilapidated farms and gently undulating dirt roads, began to blossom into a much bolder and poetic body of work. By the early 1940s he had become more impoverished financially, but with no falling away of fierce dedication to painting, even if it meant occasional use of cheap materials such as powder pigments and, it was rumoured, plaster of Paris. Finally, the onset of Huntington’s Chorea - the symptoms of which resembled extreme drunkenness - further added to his social alienation and neglect, and death in virtual anonymity at a home for incurables in 1958.
Seascape
1937Woodside Pastoral
1930Evening light, Flinders Ranges, SA
1930Willunga landscape
1947Northern Landscape (Flinders Ranges Landscape with Rain Approaching)
1930Springtime
1924Flower piece
1945Hawker, Flinders Ranges
1930Still Life
1933Woodside
1933Mt. Barker
1928The Pines
1940Magnolia
1934Southern Vales Landscape with Farm Settlement to Foreground
Study, Gum Trees, Woodside
1926The ploughed field
1947Morning mists
1947Trenerry's vision as a painter was remarkably adventurous, living a gypsy existence tracking isolated roads and fields of the coastal plain south of Adelaide, and dedicated to the pure cause of painting oblivious to fame and commercial success.