The National Gallery School’s Travelling Scholarship was awarded every three years, between 1887 and 1968, to the student with the original composition judged to be the winner of the competition based on merit. It was a fiercely coveted accolade, underscored by Australia’s relative geographical isolation, and the realities of the costly sea voyage of five or six weeks required to reach Europe prior to the advent of air travel. As an invited judge in 1902, Hugh Ramsay vividly described the emotionally charged atmosphere of the school prior to the winner being announced, noting that the contestants were so consumed with anticipation and anxiety that their faces had completely drained of colour.1 1Hugh Ramsay, letter to his brother, quoted in Deborah Hart, Hugh Ramsay, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2019. p. 158
The generous stipend made possible an array of thrilling experiences, including the option of formal tuition at prestigious institutions such as the Royal Academy in London and Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris or smaller more progressive private schools including Académie Julian and Académie Colarossi and the chance to study iconic Old Master paintings first-hand, along with opportunities for cultural enrichment and personal growth. While the Travelling Scholarship proved to be a formative influence for many prominent Australian artists, detailed first-hand accounts of their experiences and how it shaped their practice are unfortunately relatively rare. Constance Stokes (nee Parkin) is a notable exception.
Born in 1906 in the tiny Wimmera community of Miram Piram, Constance Parkin (nicknamed ‘Connie’) secured the Travelling Scholarship in 1929. After a five-year stint at the National Gallery School, she departed for England on the SS Bendigo on 7 January 1931. The twenty-five-year-old artist immediately set about recording in vivid detail her day-to-day experience during the scholarship in the United Kingdom and Europe, creating a series of illustrated diaries filled with candid observations about ship and train journeys, local customs, the people she met and even the food she tasted. In addition, she saved over a hundred other items, including address books, photographs, sketches, travel documents, hotel receipts and train tickets. As a result of this collection, her exact itinerary can be reconstructed with incredible precision more than ninety years later.
This veritable treasure trove forms only a small part of a larger repository of material amassed by the artist from her childhood until her death in 1991, collectively known as the Constance Stokes Artist Archive. Until recently, this extraordinary artist archive had remained in the care of the artist’s family, passing by descent to the artist’s son Michael, then to her daughter Lucilla, who later gifted it to her son Carlos.
I first met Stokes’s daughter, Lucilla d’Abrera, in 2020 when she contacted me with new information on her mother’s painting Dorothy Niall, 1930, which I was restoring at the time. I was thrilled when she offered to show me the archive, as I had only seen a selection of the material reproduced in her 2015 book Constance Stokes: Art and Life. I was astonished to witness its full scale and breadth, which encompasses some forty-three artworks, thirty-nine sketchbooks, ten personal diaries, nine objects, approximately two hundred and forty-five letters, nearly three hundred photographs and hundreds of press clippings and ephemera. I could never have anticipated that this fortuitous meeting would be the catalyst for the subsequent offer of this extraordinary resource to the NGV, which was formally donated this year by Dr Carlos d’Abrera through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program in memory of Constance Stokes.
The material had been exceptionally well cared for, but due to its sheer volume and complexity it would take a dedicated team of conservators, curators and other specialists over three years to assess, sort, digitise and formally process the archive. Due to the archive including the full gamut of material types typically found in an archive, including paper, objects, textiles and paintings, input was required from several conservation specialisations to identify compatible and inert storage enclosures suitable for each item.
As I sorted and grouped the materials, I began to grasp just how comprehensive the historical records are and their significance to art historical and provenance research; it is relatively rare for an artist to take such an intentional and thoughtful approach to documenting their career and legacy. In addition, I was thrilled to see that a small collection of studio materials had also survived, including colourman receipts, recipes, paints, inks, nibs and brushes, which are invaluable as reference materials for the technical study of the artist’s materials and techniques. I was also delighted to discover that Stokes had chosen to record so many personal details about her life and inner thoughts, and how her experiences had impacted on and shaped her practice.
Among the more evocative items in the archive is a series of photographs the passenger ship to England, which picture Connie and her designated chaperone and travelling companion, Margaret Birkby, sitting on the deck with a small coterie of friends. The sense of freedom and excitement is palpable, with the artist inscribing on one photo ‘happiest days of my life’.
On arrival in London, the artist rented a small basement flat in Maida Vale, and between October 1931 and June 1932 she immersed herself in an intensive drawing program at the Royal Academy, where she abandoned the smudgy charcoal drawing favoured by the National Gallery School and learned to draw with the more unforgiving tip of a pencil. Her many drawings and notebooks provide a rare insight into the extraordinary focus and discipline required to develop the virtuoso handling of line that would become a hallmark of her mature work.
While the relatively traditional studies offered by the Royal Academy were clearly fundamental to her career development, Connie craved more progressive learning experiences. In the summer of 1931, she travelled to France with fellow Australian artist Eileen Pearcy to complete a course with the famed French cubist Andre Lhote, following in the footsteps of trailblazing modernists Grace Crowley, Anne Dangar and Dorrit Black, who attended Lhote’s school between 1926 and 1928. Despite the language barriers and Lhote’s eccentric teaching style, his impact on the artist’s technique was electric. In a loose note penned at the age of 77, Connie recalled, ‘…a short stay at Andre Lhote’s made me see colour independently from subject. This opened my eyes to real creativity.’ Lhote’s principles of colour harmony, including the repetition of similar hues in pure form and tints, were masterfully applied in the artist’s c. 1933–35 painting The Village.
In April 1932, Connie and Margaret travelled to continental Europe, which was reeling from the effects of the Great Depression. The pair visited several cities in Spain, which was then a short-lived democracy known as the Second Spanish Republic, and later Italy, where Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship was well established. While Connie’s journals occasionally allude to the volatile political and economic conditions, the intrepid adventure that she describes is, in many respects, not that far removed from the modern backpacker experience. The pair often travelled third class and stayed in a motley of budget-style lodgings, with one amusing diary account describing how they took refuge in a convent after a harrowing night in an unsavoury ‘gambling den’ with resident ladies of the night.
Visiting as many galleries as possible, Connie applied herself in earnest to the close study of historical painting techniques, later recalling in a notebook from circa 1983: ‘I did not miss seeing and looking hard at everything I possibly could, so I could understand the art of the past.’
I could relate to the awe that she felt witnessing first-hand the scale and materiality of such iconic works, having experienced a similar sense of revelation when I first travelled to Europe as a recent Art History graduate. With art reproductions being very limited in Australia at the time, Connie diligently recorded the artworks that impressed her using intricate hand-drawn thumbnails, together with copious notes and colour notations.
Connie returned to Melbourne on the SS Rotorua on 15 February 1933, and as her miniature planner diary from that year attests, it was a milestone year. Having married Eric Stokes in August, she opened her first solo exhibition at the Decoration Gallery, in Little Collins Street in October and the couple departed for Europe on an extended honeymoon soon afterwards when I stumbled on Eric’s passport, I was surprised to discover that married women at the time were expected to travel on their husband’s passports, with Connie listed simply as ‘wife’.
She would later reflect on the sacrifice of freedom and personal autonomy that accompanied marriage in the 1930s and the courage and grit that it took to forge a successful career while raising three children. Writing on a loose note circa 1983 she recorded, ‘…it was very much a man’s world – everyone thought at this time that one would fall by the wayside especially if one married!’
It has been a humbling experience to work closely with Constance Stokes’s archive as it is not just a record of the artist’s career and technical development, but also her life. While many of Stokes’s contemporaries chose comparatively different life paths, her archive helps shed light on the experience of a whole generation of female artists united by an international outlook and who were pivotal in advancing modernism in Australia. Thanks to the vision of the artist and the custodianship and generosity of her family, her incredible story can now remain accessible to the public, researchers and future generations.
Raye Collins is NGV Conservator of Paintings.
The NGV warmly thanks Dr Carlos d’Abrera for donating these works to the NGV through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program in memory of Constance Stokes.
This essay was first published in NGV Magazine | Issue 55 Nov–Dec 2025.
Note
Hugh Ramsay, letter to his brother, quoted in Deborah Hart, Hugh Ramsay, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2019. p. 158