Pixie O'Harris Australia
- Born
- 15 October 1903 in United Kingdom
- Died
- 17 November 1991 in Australia
- Age
- 88 years
- Credited for
-
writing
art
- Also known as
-
Rona Harris (pen name)
Rhona Olive Pratt (changed name)
Rhona Olive Harris (birth name)
Biography
O'Harris is the daughter of noted portrait painter, George F. Harris. She spent her childhood in Cardiff and Sully, Wales and first exhibited at the Royal Art Society of South Wales at the age of fourteen. She wrote verses from an early age and started a full-length work at the age of thirteen. Her family migrated to Perth in 1920 and moved to Sydney in 1921.
Coming to Australia, people on the boat called her 'the Welsh Pixie' and she adopted the name. She later adopted the name O'Harris after a printer at the Sydney Morning Herald accidentally added an apostrophe to her second initial.
O'Harris' started her career as a commercial artist with John Sands and studied at the Julian Ashton Art School. From 1921 to 1924, she freelanced for the Sydney Mail, the Bulletin, the Triad, the Green Room and for John Sands. She contributed stories to the early Australian Children's comic and story paper, Cobbers. Some of her books in the 1940s were printed in the Offset Printing Company ("E" series) and by New Century Press.
O'Harris wrote and illustrated her own books, as well as illustrating about 20 books by other authors. Her illustrations were also used for other publications. She edited Humour from 1936 to 1939, and over the next decade decorated more than 50 children's hospital walls, schools and clinics. She became a landscape and portrait artist in the 1960s.
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