Jane Sutherland was an Australian landscape painter and teacher. A pioneer of the plein air movement in Australia, she was also notable for her advocacy to advance the professional standing of women artists. Sutherland was born to Scottish parents in New York, one of three daughters and five sons of George Sutherland. The family migrated to Sydney in 1864 and moved to Melbourne in 1870.
Unlike her brothers, George, William, and Alexander (qq.v.), Jane Sutherland pursued an art career, studying at the National Gallery School of Design, where she was taught to paint by notable Australian artists Frederick McCubbin, Eugene von Guerard and George Folingsby. From 1878 she exhibited at the Victorian Academy of Arts, then with the Australian Artists' Association, and with the Victorian Artists' Society (from 1888) until 1911. From 1888 she shared a studio with Clara Southern and Jane Price.
In 1884 Sutherland became one of the first women members of the Buonarotti Society, and in 1900 she and May Vale were the first women elected as Councilors of the Victorian Artists' Society. Sutherland was the leading female artist in the group of Melbourne painters who worked outside the studio; she took plein air sketching trips to the outlying rural districts of Alphington, Templestowe and Box Hill with her male contemporaries of the Heidelberg School.
About 1904 Sutherland suffered a stroke. She relied on her brother William for mobility and after his death in 1911 her artistic career ceased. In 1913, she moved in with her sisters, Julia and Jessie, in Highfield Grove, Kew, and her life, because of her invalid state, became very much restricted to this house. She died at home on 25 July 1928, and was buried in the Presbyterian section of the Box Hill Cemetery.
