A noted Australian artist and illustrator, Thea Proctor was considered 'an arbiter of taste and always elegantly dressed'. She 'wrote on fashion, flower arranging, colours for cars and interior decoration. She organized artists' balls in the 1920s, designed the fashionably modern Lacquer Room restaurant (1932) for Farmer & Co. Ltd and produced theatre décor in the 1940s. In her latter years she continued to encourage young and innovative artists and to paint, in a looser, sensuous manner, carried out portrait commissions' and regularly exhibited her artwork. (Source: Australian Dictionary of Biography Online)
Proctor was a 'major contributor' of the cover designs that defined the look of a journal which epitomised modern style, The Home: An Australian Quarterly. From 'its inception in 1920', this influential publication developed 'a pictorial vocabulary' which was foregrounded by the modernist artworks that appeared on its cover. According to Robert Holden, Proctor is credited with one of 'the most famous examples of cover art in Australian history', appearing on the July issue of The Home (1927), Proctor 'later reworked' the image 'as a woodcut and entitled it The Rose'. (Source: Robert Holden Cover Up: The Art of Magazine Covers in Australia, 1995)
Proctor's cousin,
Hera Roberts (q.v.), was also noted for contributing modernist cover designs for
The Home.
