Dora Chapman (24 March 1911 – 15 May 1995), also known as Dora Cant, was a pre and post-war artist and art teacher who painted landscapes, still-life and portraits in oils, watercolours, gouache and acrylics. She created etchings and prints and was also an accomplished silks-screen printer and potter. A resident of South Australia, New South Wales and England, she was concerned with changing society through social realist art.
Dora Cecil Chapman was born on 24 March 1911 at Mount Barker, SA. She was the daughter of Henry Bruce Chapman (1877-1952), a registered land agent, and Ida Florence Pearl (née Jackson) (1886-1975) who had married at St James Church, Blakiston, SA on 17 July 1907. She was their oldest daughter (her only sister was Margaret) and she had five brothers (Harry, Jack, Douglas, Clifford and Roland). Dora was “artistic” from a young child being dressed as “Miss Japan” in a costume competition at the Mount Barker Australia Day celebrations as early as 1917 and dressed as a “queen of bowers” in the Children’s Red Cross car procession at Mount Barker in 1918.
Dora Chapman attended the Mount Barker Primary School (1917-23) and Mount Barker High School (1924-27). In her final year at the Mount Barker High School, the headmaster Mr. J. E. Smith noticed her talent for drawing and encouraged her to apply for a scholarship to study at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts (SASAC) in Adelaide. Dora spent three years on scholarship at the School of Arts and Crafts (1928-30) in Adelaide and on completion of her studies she worked for some time in her father’s office, which allowed her to remain at the school for two more years (1931-32). Her main teachers and tutors at this time were Louis McCubbin, Dorrit Black, Leslie Wilkie and Marie Tuck . Dora was an outstanding student and achieved excellent results in her art studies, often achieving credits and honors and sometimes topping her class, particularly in drawing and painting. She was a SASAC prizewinner in 1929 and won the John Christie Wright Prize for figure drawing. Her fellow students included Ivor Hele, John Dowie, Ivor Francis, Vi Johns, Douglas Welsh and Ruth Tuck.
Some of her earliest artworks, dating from 1930, clearly show her prodigious talent including landscapes in oils, portrait drawings in charcoal and life drawings in pastels. Also in 1930, for example, she won prizes in the needlework and painting sections of the Mount Barker Show, at SASA she won equal second prize in the Harry P. Gill Memorial Medal competition for excellence in design and workmanship among technical art students for a silk-shawl (brush-batik) work and at the All Australian Exhibition where she received an honorable mention in a competition to apply a design based on a plant study in any medium. Later in 1933 she won cookery competitions organized by the Housewives Association. Clearly her talents and abilities as a young woman were across a wide range of “artist” endeavours.
Dora lived with her parents in Verdun Street in North Kensington while studying and she maintained an active social life including being on the committee of the Trianon (dance) Club. Dora, unlike many young women of the time, could drive a car and in December 1932 she accompanied her parents on a three-week trip to Sydney where they “will travel by motor and Miss Chapman will relieve her father at the wheel”. In December 1933 Dora and some other SASAC students including Douglas Welsh held an exhibition of their artworks in Edments Building where almost all of the works sold and some commissions were placed. In 1935 she held her first solo exhibition of 37 works at the Myer “Apollo” Dining Hall in Adelaide. In 1938 she was awarded the RSASA Portrait Prize for her portrait of John Dowie and in October 1939 she was elected as an associate member, and later as a Fellow, of the Royal South Australian Society of Arts (RSASA). In 1940 she won the RSASA Melrose Portrait Prize for a self-portrait and later the Olive Dutton Green Watercolour Prize.
Dora was appointed as art teacher at the private Stawell Girl’s School at Mount Lofty where she taught art and crafts to all grades at the school. She was later was a member of CAS (Contemporary Art Society) in both Sydney and Adelaide. During WW2 Dora joined the Australian Army and worked for the Army Education Service in Adelaide, Melbourne and later Sydney as a librarian, organizer of exhibitions and lecturer on art between 1942 and 1945. While in Sydney in 1944 she became very sick with a thyroid problem that required surgery. She met, and on 30 June 1945, at the age of 34 years, she married the artist James Cant, the same year that she joined the Communist Party. They had no children.
She was a founder with James Cant, Hal Missingham, Bernard Smith, Roderick Shaw, and Roy Dalgarno, of the Studio of Realist Art (SORA) in Sydney in 1946. Dora was the secretary of SORA from 1946 to 1949. In August 1949 an interest in Aboriginal culture led them to take reproductions of Gunbalanya (Oenpelli) rock art from Arnhem Land for exhibition at the Berkeley Gallery in London. These were received enthusiastically by a number of viewers, including Professor Julian Huxley, Professor J.B.S. Haldane and the sculptor, Henry Moore. James and Dora spent more than five years in London, France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy between 1949 and 1955. They spent a brief time in Adelaide before they returned to Sydney and then in 1957 moved permanently back to Adelaide.
In 1956, under the name Dora C. Cant, she exhibited four works (two Abstract Enamels, a Life Study and an oil painting of Port Willunga lent by Mrs F. Nora? Burden) in the SASAC Staff exhibition. In Adelaide she taught privately and then as a lecturer in drawing and painting at the South Australian School of Art (SASA = the former SASAC was renamed SASA in 1958) fulltime from 1958 to 1969 and then part-time until 1974. She exhibited two oil paintings (Goats and Sisters) in the SASA Staff exhibition in October 1959. Dora became the main breadwinner in the 1960s as James Cant’s multiple-sclerosis developed. She won the RSASA Melrose Prize for portrait painting for the second time in 1961.
James and Dora Cant lived in 3 Park Road, Kensington Park for many years (1959 until her death in 1995). They are known to have visited the Willunga District from the late 1950s. It has been suggested that they may have regularly stayed in Willunga and perhaps from as early as 1962 they may have rented 13 St Peters Terrace from the owner Penbertha Alice Pointon, who died in 1964. On 9 January 1965 they purchased Heysed’s Cottage (Somerset) at 13 St Peters Terrace, Wilunga from Ms. Pointon’s executors as their second home in the country (pied-a-terre or holiday house). They spent some time here in the late 1960s and became interested in the old Courthouse and Police Station in the High Street. Dora and James saw it as a possible permanent public gallery for James’ paintings. They approached the National Trust of South Australia and the District Council of Willunga but neither organization would bear the expenditure for restoration and the ongoing operational costs. When James died in 1982 Dora inherited the property. When Dora died in 1995 the property was bequeathed to the National Trust of SA and it was restored and subsequently returned to private ownership.
Her works were exhibited regularly at Australian galleries including 12 works in a joint exhibition with James Cant at the Hahndorf Gallery in 1959, 40 small works at the Myer Gallery in 1962, and acrylics, gouaches and serigraphs at the Lidums Art Gallery in Beaumont, SA in 1972. Then 29 works at the City of Hamilton Gallery in Victoria in 1971, another joint exhibition with James Cant of painting, prints and pots at the Lyceum Club in 1976 and a solo exhibition at the Bonython – Meadmore Gallery (BMG) in Adelaide in 1987. Her final exhibition (with Fred Williams) shortly before her death was at the Artstok Gallery in Sydney in 1994. She also contributed to many joint (mixed) exhibitions over the years. She had retired from full-time work at SASA in 1969 at the age of 58 but continued to teach part-time until 1974. In 1974 Dora was briefly the Art Critic for the Adelaide Advertiser newspaper. On 15 May 1995 Dora Chapman, aged 84 years, died and she was buried with her husband in a plot at the Uniting Cemetery in the historic town of Willunga that they had chosen in 1960.
Dora Chapman’s works are represented in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, in the state galleries of South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania, at the University of Adelaide and the University of Western Australia and in regional galleries such as Hamilton Art Gallery as well as in private collections in Australia and overseas.
