Florence Ada Fuller (1867 – 17 July 1946) was a South African-born Australian artist. Originally from Port Elizabeth, Fuller migrated as a child to Melbourne next her family. There she trained next her uncle Robert Hawker Dowling and college Jane Sutherland and took classes at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, becoming a professional player in the late 1880s. In 1892 she left Australia, travelling first to South Africa, where she met and painted for Cecil Rhodes, and then on to Europe. She lived and studied there for the subsequent decade, except for a reward to South Africa in 1899 to paint a portrait of Rhodes. Between 1895 and 1904 her works were exhibited at the Paris Salon and London’s Royal Academy.
In 1904, Fuller returned to Australia, living in Perth. She became supple in the Theosophical Society and painted some of her best-known work, including A Golden Hour, described by the National Gallery of Australia as a “masterpiece” when it acquired the performance in 2013. Beginning in 1908, Fuller travelled extensively, living in India and England before ultimately settling in Sydney. There, she was the inaugural studious of vivaciousness drawing at the School of Fine and Applied Arts, established in 1920 by the New South Wales Society of Women Painters. She died in 1946.
Highly regarded during her supple career as a portrait and landscape painter, by 1914 Fuller was represented in four public galleries—three in Australia and one in South Africa—a record for a girl who was an Australian painter at that time. In 1927 she began nearly twenty years of institutionalization in a mental asylum, however, and her death went without notice. After her death, information very nearly her was frequently omitted from insinuation books approximately Australian painters and knowledge of her play-act became technical despite her paintings inborn held in public art collections including the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Australia’s National Portrait Gallery.
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