Otho Orde Dangar's father was William Snowdon Dangar who came to Australia in 1836 from Cornwall, England. After acquiring a position as superintendent of the station Greenburn on the Hastings River in 1841, he sent to England for his wife Susannah and two children, William and Elizabeth, to join him. Three more children, Otho (1842), Pauline (1845) and Islet (1847), were born before they moved to the Macleay River where William Senior became a sergeant in the Border Police Station at Belgrave Falls.

Anne was born on 1 December 1885, one of five children of Otho Orde and Elizabeth (nee Garvin) Dangar.

At the age of 19, Otho Dangar was doing the mail run from Kempsey to Armidale on horseback. In 1868 he married Elizabeth Garvin and the couple had five children: Pauline, Otho, Ruby, Zilla (Queenie) and Annie. Otho worked in his sister Elizabeth's store and post office on the western banks of the Macleay at the end of Belgrave Street and became postmaster after his sister was killed in a horse riding accident in 1875. He became an auctioneer, was an alderman on the first Kempsey Borough Council in 1886 and was the Member for the Macleay in the NSW Legislative Assembly from 1889 to 1893.

Their youngest child, Anne, was born on 1 December 1885 and attended East Kempsey Public School. She had drawing lessons from the Gabriel sisters, daughters of Dr Charles Louis Gabriel and Rhoda, nee Rudder, a daughter of Enoch William Rudder. In 1906, Annie moved to Sydney to further her career as an artist and studied painting under Horace Moore-Jones.

Anne (or Annie as she now called herself) returned to Kempsey in 1911 where she advertised lessons in "Out-Door Sketching, Still Life, Copy Painting, Drawing and Sketching" and held an exhibition of her own and her pupils works. She was appointed judge of the art section at the Kempsey Show in 1913.

By 1916 Annie had left Kempsey and joined Julian Ashton's Sydney Art School where she taught from 1920. There she met Grace Crowley and they discussed modernist ideas in painting. This interest led to the friends travelling to France in 1926, where Annie was deeply impressed by the work of Paul Cezanne.

After studying at Andre Lhote's academy in Paris with Grace, Annie returned alone to Australia in 1928. She set up her own studio in Sydney but the art establishment was anti-modernist and her efforts to introduce modern art theories there were met with dismay. When a cable arrived offering her a teaching position at the residential art school at Moly-Sabata in the south of France, Annie did not hesitate but packed up and left, arriving back in France in March 1930. She was never to see Australia again.

More local history:

Annie took up pottery at Moly-Sabata and quickly achieved recognition in France as a potter, teacher and painter. In the late 1940s, she considered returning to South West Rocks where she owned land, but she was too entrenched in her life and work in France and was always short of money. Annie Garvin Dangar died of cancer in 1951 and was buried near Moly-Sabata.

The Macleay River Historical Society possesses several of Annie's paintings and her landscape of Trial Bay is currently on display in the "From the Vaults" exhibition at Kempsey Museum.

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content: