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For as long as I can remember, a gloomy portrait of an old man used to hang in the hallway of my Aunty Chris’ house in Colac, Victoria. It was positioned opposite the doorway to the front bedroom, which once belonged to my grandparents. I never knew them, but their presence – and the spectre of the man in the painting – loomed large over my childhood visits to Colac. I had no idea who he was, but I was sure to avoid that end of the hall after dark.

I’m now probably not much younger than the ‘old’ man in the portrait. It no longer hangs in my auntie’s hallway, but since her passing in 2020 I’ve been increasingly curious about our family history. This led me to discover that the man in the painting was my great-grandfather, Thomas Carson Muntz. The artist? His sister, and my great-great-aunt, Josephine Muntz Adams.

Over the last 12 months, I’ve been piecing together the fragments of Josephine’s extraordinary life. Long before women had the right to vote in Australia – that came in 1902 – Josephine was travelling the world, honing her craft and earning her place as one of Australia’s most distinguished portrait artists of her time.

Her contemporaries included notable artists such as Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin, Clara Southern, Jane Sutherland and Margaret Preston. Despite the esteemed company she kept, surprisingly little is known about Josephine’s life. There are no diaries, just a handful of photos and few firsthand accounts that capture her voice. Her legacy is, above all, the art she left behind – remarkable and diverse.

At Josephine’s solo retrospective exhibition at the Athenaeum Gallery in 1943, The Herald¹ remarked: ‘Mrs Adams has every right to a permanent position in Australian painting.’