Maude Mary Haydon (6 November 1886 – 9 January 1978) was an Australian pastoral and landscape artist.
Maude Mary Haydon was born at Bloomfield near Murrurundi, New South Wales on 6 November 1886. [1] She was raised a middle child in a pastoral family of 6 on Bloomfield station, but was handicapped by deafness. Haydon was a good horsewoman who rode from an early age under the watchful eye of her father Bernard Haydon [2] a renowned horseman and master of Bloomfield. She developed and maintained a keen interest in the sport of horse racing for the rest of her life. She finished her education at 17 years of age at SCEGGS, [3] Darlinghurst, Sydney, where she showed a talent for art. [4]
Haydon was trained by English art teacher Julian Ashton at his renowned Art School in Sydney in the 1900s. [4] She caused a moral scandal when she took a group of Bohemian art students camping in the mountains of the Upper Hunter on H.L. White's Belltrees station at Woolooma near Scone. They also climbed 900 metres above the landscape to the top of Mt Woolooma. Haydon produced large numbers of watercolour impressionist style works, depicting scenes of Bloomfield and the landscapes of the Upper Hunter over many years. [4] Haydon contributed works to the Women Artists exhibition in Sydney in 1934. [5] Haydon frequently gave her paintings away to family and friends [4] and they formed a tangible and evocative bond with Bloomfield. She also donated them to assist in fundraising. [6]
Haydon travelled aged 27 with her sister Madge Haydon, on a steamship to Europe to obtain specialist medical treatment for deafness in Vienna, Austria in 1914, but unfortunately World War I (WWI) interrupted the plan. [4] Haydon was adventurous and they turned disappointment into a holiday and saw the sights. Haydon and her sister visited Victorian portrait artist Agnes Goodsir and her brother, banker and friend of Bernard Haydon, Noel Goodsir in Maida Vale, London, England. They visited Hayden relatives in Ireland, who took the ladies riding on a fox hunt. [4] They climbed 1,300 metres above the landscape to the top of snow-covered Ben Nevis with Agnes Goodsir. Haydon later donated £5 to Agnes for the care of wounded WWI soldiers recovering in her home. [4]
Haydon was a good friend of Noel's son Norman Goodsir, and they maintained a correspondence during his explosive service in the AIF Artillery in France in WWI. [4] He was tragically murdered in London in 1919 [7] and she never married. Haydon spent her life living and working at 'Bloomfield' homestead with the Haydon family. [4] She maintained close relations with most of its members, and was a prolific correspondent who kept them all informed of the news of the family. [4] After the death of her father in 1932, she arranged Christmas gatherings at 'Bloomfield' that was attended by a crowd of family and friends from at least 2 States for over 40 years. During WWII she hosted soldiers wives and children of the Upper Hunter to a wonderful Christmas dinner party. [8]
Haydon was a prominent social identity of the Upper Hunter. She was a bright personality, who was an excellent communicator despite her deafness and very generous. She used to drive a cart pulled by 'Jolly' the horse around the district, delivering mail until the 1950s. After her mother died in 1942, she became the mistress of Bloomfield homestead and continued to keep an open door house. Haydon collected guests from the Blandford Railway Station in a horse and sulky and later in a car, for over 50 years.
Maude Haydon died at 91 years of age in 1978 and was buried in Murrurundi Cemetery.
The Hunter River is a major river in New South Wales, Australia. The Hunter River rises in the Liverpool Range and flows generally south and then east, reaching the Tasman Sea at Newcastle, the second largest city in New South Wales and a major harbour port. Its lower reaches form an open and trained mature wave dominated barrier estuary.
Murrurundi( MURR-oo-RUN-dye), is a rural town located in the Upper Hunter Shire, in the Upper Hunter region of New South Wales, Australia.
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Henry Luke White was a wealthy grazier, and a keen philatelist, book collector, amateur ornithologist and oölogist of Scone, New South Wales, Australia.
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Sir Joseph Palmer Abbott, was an Australian politician, pastoralist and solicitor.
Hanna Kay is an Australian artist.
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Agnes Noyes Goodsir was an Australian portrait painter who lived in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s.
Henry Dangar was a surveyor and explorer of Australia in the early period of British colonisation. He became a successful pastoralist and businessman, and also served as a magistrate and politician. He was born on 18 November 1796 at St Neot, Cornwall, United Kingdom, and was the first of six brothers to emigrate as free settlers to New South Wales. From 1845 to 1851 Dangar was a Member of the New South Wales Legislative Council.
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John Norton Oxley was an Australian farmer and politician. He was a member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly for one term between 1856 and 1857.
Freda Rhoda Robertshaw (1916–1997) was an Australian artist and painter of neoclassical figures and landscapes. Her works are represented in major Australian public galleries, and her Standing Nude (1944) was considered a key attraction at a 2001 exhibition of Modern Australian Women at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Robert George Dundas Fitzgerald was a New Zealand-born Australian politician.
Francis John White was a pastoralist and politician in New South Wales, Australia.
Lewis Wolfe Levy was an English-born Australian businessman and politician.
James Cobb White was an Australian grazier and politician, predominantly in New South Wales.
Margo Lewers (1908–1978) was an Australian interdisciplinary abstract artist who worked across the media of painting, sculpture, tapestry, ceramics and the domestic arts. She was renowned for a number of major public commissions and for her landscaping and interior design for the family home at Emu Plains. Her early compositions explored colour and formal geometric abstraction; her work became more fluid and expressionist by the early 1960s. She showed extensively in Australia and in several international travelling exhibitions. She won at least fourteen awards and prizes. The Penrith Regional Gallery and Lewers Bequest now stands on her property at Emu Plains.
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Wilson Memorial Community Hospital located in Murrurundi, New South Wales, was designed by architect George McRae and completed in 1919. It is now proposed to be demolished to make way for a new hospital. Community groups have been fighting to get the hospital heritage listed.