Esther Gwendolyn "Stella" Bowen was an Australian artist and writer
Background
Bowen was born in North Adelaide, an inner suburb of Adelaide, South Australia. As a young girl, Bowen enjoyed drawing and convinced her mother to allow her to study with Margaret Preston. However, her desire to pursue art training in Melbourne was thwarted by her mother"s ill health and reluctance to let her daughter follow such a career.
When her mother died in 1914, Bowen left for England with a return ticket and an allowance of £20 per month.
The couple fled to rural England where their daughter Julie was born in 1920.
Education
In cosmopolitan London, she studied at the Westminster School of Art and mixed in the exhilarating company of writers, artists, poets and political activists.
Career
Early in 1918, Bowen met and fell in love with the writer Ford Madox Ford. She was twenty-four, he was forty-four. But by 1922 the family were federal up with the hardships of life in the English countryside and moved temporarily to France.
They soon decided to remain in France and moved to Paris.
Caught up in the bohemian café society of Paris, Ford started a literary magazine and was a leading figure among the expatriate writers. Bowen separated from Ford in 1927.
lieutenant was a difficult time for her but it did give her the time and space to pursue her art She began to gain some portrait commissions but still struggled to earn enough money.
In 1932, she went to the United States at the invitation of the poet Ramon Guthrie, who helped her in finding commissions including, among others, with Sinclair Lewis.
When she returned to France she found she could not afford to remain in Paris and returned to England on her fortieth birthday. Although Bowen continued to paint she did not earn enough from painting and commissions to make ends meet and for many years supplemented her income by writing an art review column in the News Chronicle and teaching. Because of her relationship with Ford Madox Ford she was given an advance to write a biography and produced Drawn from life: a memoir.
This book came out to glowing reviews.
The Second World War brought a new chapter in Bowen"s career. In 1944, she was appointed an official war artist by the Australian War Memorial.
These talks provided Bowen with additional income during a difficult time and they resulted in the offer of the position of war artist. Bowen"s brief as a war artist was to depict the activities of the Royal Australian Air Force (Royal Australian Air Force) stationed in England.
She also painted portraits of military commanders and Australian prisoners of war who had recently been repatriated from Europe.
One of the first women artists to be appointed, Stella completed her last painting in 1947. She died later that year of colon cancer, having never returned to Australia. Two portraits by Bowen are in the National Portrait Gallery collection, George Douglas Howard Cole and Dame Margaret Isabel Cole.
A painting of Admiral Sir Ragnar Colvin painted in 1944 is held by the Australian War Memorial.