Christian Waller

Christian Waller (née Yandell, 1894–1954), printmaker, muralist and stained-glass artist, was born in Castlemaine, Victoria and commenced studying art at the Castlemaine School of Mines in 1905. She subsequently trained at the Bendigo School of Mines and exhibited work at Bendigo Art Gallery before moving to Melbourne in 1910 and continuing her training at the National Gallery of Victoria School. She commenced exhibiting with the Victorian Artists Society while still a student and won several student awards for her work. She married fellow student Mervyn Napier Waller in October 1915, a couple of months after he'd enlisted for service with the AIF. In 1917, Napier was severely wounded while serving on the Western Front, resulting in the amputation of his right arm. Christian's income as a commercial artist proved indispensable as Napier sought to return to work as an artist, and during the 1920s she achieved considerable success as an illustrator, creating illustrations for titles including Australian Fairy Tales (1925) and The mad painter and other bush sketches (1926). She began designing stained glass windows in the late 1920s, when she and Napier travelled to England to observe the manufacture of stained glass by the firm Whall & Whall, established in 1922 by Christopher Whitworth Whall, a leading figure in the Arts & Crafts Movement.

After returning to Australia, Christian continued to produce woodcuts, linocuts, illustrations, book plates and stained glass, her work in each of these mediums demonstrating an Arts & Crafts influence as well as that of the Pre-Raphaelites, Art Nouveau, Art Deco and medievalism, and examining various themes drawn from Theosophy, mythology, astrology and other sources. In 1932, she registered her own publishing business, Golden Arrow Press; and her hand-printed book The Great Breath: a book of seven designs became the first of her works acquired by a public collection (of the National Gallery of Victoria). As a muralist she is known for works including Robe of Glory, executed for the Fawkner Crematorium in 1937, and the nativity mural for Christ Church, Geelong, commissioned in 1942. For many years she was the only Australian woman working in stained glass, completing over 65 commissions for churches in Victoria and New South Wales from the late 1920s until 1953 and producing more than 100 individual stained-glass panels. She spent some time in a spiritualist community in New York following her estrangement from Napier in the late 1930s. After returning to Australia in 1940 she lived with her artist-niece Klytie Pate in the house at Ivanhoe that she and Napier had designed with the principles of William Morris and the Arts & Crafts Movement in mind.

Gift of an anonymous donor 2022