Lola McCausland
Lola McCausland - Portrait Artist (1922-2005)
Most of you will recognise this 1912 picture of the W.H. Ashton butcher shop on the corner of Cochrane and Latrobe Streets.
William Harwood Ashton was a well-known Master Butcher who built a very large business consisting of 15 shops, slaughter yards and resting paddocks. The head shop was in Paddington (as pictured) where the Ashton family also lived.
William had four children… Madge, Irene, Violet and son, Arthur.
His daughter, Madge, married Louis John McCausland in 1922. After some time living at a house named Eringa at The Drive, off Simpson’s Road, in Bardon, the family moved to Harwood at 57 Oleander Drive, Ashgrove, sometime around 1928.
Harwood was the scene of many a party, the family frequently hosting up to 100 guests for dancing, music (Madge was a great pianist) and Bridge, particularly in the pre-WWII years. During the war, the McCauslands also entertained allied servicemen in their home as members of the Australian-American Association.
The McCausland family had two children… Lola Jean, born in 1922, and John Ashton, born in 1927.
Daughter, Lola Jean McCausland (granddaughter of W.H. Ashton, butcher), attended St Margaret’s in Brisbane (1936-1938) and then boarded at The Glennie School in Toowoomba.
Lola began drawing at school and held a position at the Courier Mail’s Art Department for a while. Her professional art training however came from classes with Brisbane artist Caroline Barker. Barker was famous for her still life sketches and portraits, with two of her works featuring on the cover of “The Queenslander” Magazine in the 1930s.
Originally known for her studies of ballet dancers in pastels, Lola would spend time at ballet schools, and backstage at performances, to sketch action pictures of the ballerinas. Lola said that while she enjoyed the ballet drawings, portrait painting had always been her ambition.
1953 saw Lola and her mother Madge travel to London to further advance Lola’s portraiture skills. The purpose of the trip was for Lola to study art in London, Paris and Italy, and to return home via America to visit family.
During the outbound trip on the ship Orcades, Lola was kept busy creating portrait sketches of fellow travellers, Arthur Morris, Keith Miller, Don Tallon and George Davies, of the Australian Cricket Team.
McCausland studied art the Chelsea School of Art and took private lessons from the well-known English portrait painter, Philip Lambe (Member of the Royal Society of Portrait painters).
Lola was overseas for 18 months, visiting many art galleries across the European continent. She sold many of her ballet pastels and completed as many as 10 commissioned artworks, eight of them portraits, including one of Lord Wodehouse, young son of the Earl of Kimberley, and of Lord Brookeborough, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland.
Upon her return to Brisbane, McCausland became one of the most in-demand portrait artists in Australia.
Some of her subjects included Babette Stephens (Inaugural President of Zonta Club), Fellow Glennie girl, Dame Annabelle Rankin, Sir John Lavarack (former Major General and Queensland Governor), Professor Dorothy Hill (Geologist and Paleontologist) and Julius Kruttschnitt (Chairman of Mt Isa Mines).
Other commissions included the design for the mosaics at Star of the Sea Cathedral in Darwin – The Stations of the Cross, made from Venetian glass.
Lola also painted many still life flowers, and it was one of these that popped up recently in my Instagram news feed, from Turn O'the Century Antiques on Oxley Rd, Sherwood. Of course, knowing a little of her reputation, and having a fondness for the local connection, I snapped it up (and the colours are divine!).
It wasn’t until I did a little more investigating that I found another local connection from a 2019 post by the Ashgrove Historical Society (AHS), where Peter Eedy (Administrator of the AHS Facebook Page) posted a picture of his mother, Bridget’s portrait, painted by Lola McCausland in 1962 (Oil on canvas 60cm x 50cm).
Lola McCausland continued to live in the family home at 57 Oleander Drive in Ashgrove, finally selling in 1991. As far as I can tell, Lola never married, and she passed away in 2005.
If you are a family member or know more about Lola McCausland, please get in touch!
paddingtonthenandnow@gmail.com
