A multi-talented legend, Florence Broadhurst expressed her creativity through various mediums : she was successively singer, teacher, designer, businesswoman, banjolele player and got implied in several causes. She was a foundation member of the Art Gallery Society of New South Wales and a member of the Society of Interior Designers of Australia, was a teacher of printmaking and sculpture at the National Art School and was also involved in a variety of charitable activities.
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| Solar -wallpaper by Florence Broadhurst |
Born in 1899, Broadhurst's first career was as a performer. Her considerable singing talent took her to India, South-East Asia and China in the early 1920s. She founded an arts academy in Shanghai in 1926 and later moved to London, where she married and reinvented herself as Madame Pellier, running a fashion atelier on Bond Street.
Her time in Asia "made a huge sensory impression on her"; inspiration for the bamboo, peacocks, butterflies and water birds that featured in her figurative designs.
She will be remembered as the larger-than-life socialite who could be found mixing with high society when she wasn't at her Paddington factory. With her generous auburn or pink bouffant, outre fashion sense and audacious personality, she was hard to miss.
Her murder in 1977 is still a mystery and increased all the more her fame.
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