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Edwin Arthur Vincent Sheldon

3 July 1895 — 19 July 1945

Eliza Jeanettie Sheldon and Edwin Arthur Vincent Sheldon (7‑95‑13/14)

Jeanettie Sheldon, was born on 24 May 1885 in Williamstown, Victoria, the eldest of five children of English‑born parents Edwin Arthur Sheldon and his second wife Phoebe Emily, née Fisher. By 1890 the family had settled in Brisbane, where Edwin ran a jewellery business at Fortitude Valley. Vincent was born on 3 July 1895 in South Brisbane, the youngest of the five children.

Jeanettie studied art at Brisbane Technical College. Between 1909 and 1919 she exhibited oils, sketches and painting on porcelain at shows held by the (Royal) National Agricultural and Industrial Association of Queensland. She opened the Sheldon Gallery in 1921. Elected to the (Royal) Queensland Art Society, she served as vice‑president (1922), secretary (1923‑31 and 1937‑43) and a council‑member (1932‑36). From 1923 to 1960 she exhibited pottery, oils and watercolours at its shows.

Vincent was educated by the Christian Brothers at St James's School, Brisbane. He studied commercial art in the United States of America (1920) and England (1924), and worked as a freelance cartoonist in Brisbane in 1924‑26. He visited London in 1929 to learn drypoint under W. P. Robins at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, Holborn. The British Museum acquired three of his etchings, and the Victoria and Albert Museum two monotypes.

Back in Brisbane, Vincent taught printmaking at his home at Clayfield. In 1931 he was elected a member of the Australian Painter‑Etchers' Society. His drypoints of country scenes, and of Brisbane and its landmarks, were described in 1934 as being executed with 'rare skill' and 'joyous animation'. On 9 July 1934 at All Saints Church, Wickham Terrace, he married with Anglican rites Cynthia Ruth Sturtridge; they were childless.

During World War II Vincent worked in a munitions factory until illness forced him to resign. Survived by his wife, he died of a coronary occlusion on 19 July 1945 at Boolarong, near Caboolture, and was buried with Catholic rites. A memorial exhibition of his work was held in Brisbane in 1948. In 1981 Sheldon's widow gave more than two hundred of his works to the Queensland Art Gallery.

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