B. 1894-1982

Born in Melbourne in 1894, Mabel Pye was a painter and printmaker best known for her vivid watercolours and linocuts that captured landscapes, portraits, and scenes from the ballet with bold colour and expressive line. She studied at the National Gallery School under Bernard Hall and exhibited widely throughout Victoria, becoming a regular contributor to exhibitions from the 1920s through the 1940s.

Pye shared a creative upbringing with her younger sister Hazel, also an artist, in a home studio built by their father in Surrey Hills. The family’s involvement with the amateur theatre group, The Benwerrin Players, enriched her early engagement with the arts. A member of both the Victorian Artists Society and the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors — where she worked alongside artists such as Sybil Craig and Ola Cohn — Pye was active in both artistic and civic spheres, notably protesting the destruction of trees along Alexandra Avenue.

Her most distinctive works are her ballet scenes, painted from memory after attending performances by companies such as Ballet Rambert. She was a member of the Australian Ballet Society and brought a lyrical, atmospheric quality to these works, as well as to her landscapes of the Blue Dandenongs. Pye’s art is held in several major public collections, including the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the State Library Victoria. She died in 1982, leaving behind a legacy of quietly radical, richly coloured Australian modernism.