Ina Gregory

Georgina Alice ‘Ina’ Gregory (1874–1964), artist, was born in Melbourne, the daughter of barrister, scholar and amateur theologian, John Burslem Gregory and his wife, Alice. Against her mother’s wishes, Gregory studied at the National Gallery of Victoria school and attended classes run by Emanuel Phillips Fox and Tudor St George Tucker at the Melbourne School of Art and at Charterisville in Heidelberg. A portraitist who came to specialise in landscapes and garden views, she exhibited from 1898 to 1912 with the Victorian Artists’ Society and in the 1907 Exhibition of Women’s Work. For some years she and her sister Ada lived together at the back of the family home, Rosedale, in relative seclusion; they believed in karma, and aimed at ‘a life intellectual and emotional, lifted far above the materiality of an average existence.’ By 1908, according to some accounts, Gregory was practically nocturnal. She wrote a novel, Blue Wings, evoking her life as a student at the Melbourne School. From 1938 to 1948 Gregory and a fellow painter, Jane Price, lived together at Rosedale. After Price died, Gregory was attended by a paid companion, who shared her unorthodox spiritual outlook.