There she trained with her uncle Robert Hawker Dowling and teacher Jane Sutherland and took classes at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, becoming a professional artist in the late 1880s.

There, she was the inaugural teacher of life drawing at the School of Fine and Applied Arts, established in 1920 by the New South Wales Society of Women Painters.

During this period she was a student of Jane Sutherland,[4] referred to in the Australian Dictionary of Biography as "the leading female artist in the group of Melbourne painters who broke with the nineteenth-century tradition of studio art by sketching and painting directly from nature".

In that year, aged eighteen, Fuller received a commission from Anne Fraser Bon, philanthropist and supporter of Victoria's Aboriginal people.

[notes 3] While there, she was a guest of her uncle Sir Thomas Ekins Fuller, a member of the Parliament of the Cape of Good Hope, and through him she met Cecil Rhodes, the Colony's Prime Minister, who commissioned her to paint a landscape showing his home.

[19][4][20] Many of the French art schools had only recently opened their doors to women, and those at Académie Julian experienced poor, overcrowded conditions and contempt from the (mostly male) teachers.

Other Australian artists whose works were hung at the same time included Rupert Bunny, E. Phillips Fox, Albert Fullwood, George Lambert, and Arthur Streeton.

[37] For the next four years, she painted portraits, including one of Western Australian politician James George Lee Steere, undertaken posthumously from photographs and recollections of those who had known him.

Fuller's paintings from this period included A Golden Hour, described by the National Gallery of Australia as "a masterpiece ... giving us a gentle insight into the people, places and times that make up our history".

When the painting was put up for sale in 2012, the auction house catalogue stated that it had been owned by William Ride, former director of the Western Australian Museum.

It reported:The current owners assert that Professor Ride always understood the figures in the picture were Sir John Winthrop Hackett, (then owner of The West Australian newspaper, well known business man and philanthropist, whose gift allowed the construction of the impressive University of Western Australia buildings and St. George's Residential College) and his new wife, Deborah Vernon Hackett".

[39][notes 5] In addition to appearing as the small figure of a woman in A Golden Hour, Deborah Vernon Hackett was also the subject of a portrait, painted around 1908, again during Fuller's time in Perth.

But she also conveyed the complexity of the young Mrs Hackett's character through her soft, feminine, pale-blue dress counterpoised by the dramatic black hat and direct gaze.

In a 1937 piece reflecting on early twentieth-century art in Western Australia, a reviewer recalled:Dr. (later Sir Winthrop) Hackett was a great patron of Miss Fuller, and he was a constant visitor to her dignified studio, above his office in the old West Australian Chambers.

Miss Fuller painted Lady Hackett both before and after her marriage, and one particularly happy picture of her is as a young girl gathering wildflowers in the Darlington hills.

[41]Biographer Joan Kerr speculated that it may have been Jane Sutherland who introduced Fuller to Theosophy, a spiritual and mystical philosophy that teaches the unity of existence and emphasises the search for universal wisdom.

Described by art historian Jenny McFarlane as "the most important counter-cultural organisation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries", it was influential throughout Fuller's life.

[45] Around the same period, she painted other portraits of the movement's leading figures, including Henry Steel Olcott and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.

These representations departed from the academic portraiture in which Fuller had trained, as she incorporated practices of intuition and visualisation "inspired by Indian aesthetics as mediated by the Theosophical Society".

[notes 7] Of her time in India, Fuller wrote:I went in search not only of beauty, and light, and colour, and the picturesqueness in general, which delight the eye and emotions of all artists—but of something deeper—something less easily expressed.

I spent two and a half years in a community that is quite unique—perhaps the most cosmopolitan settlement in the world—the headquarters of the Theosophical Society ... Well, I painted there, of course, but my art was undergoing a change, and I felt that it could not satisfy me unless it became so much greater.

Leadbeater arrived around the same time as Fuller, and soon afterward he "discovered" the person he believed would become a global teacher and orator, Jiddu Krishnamurti (then in his teens).

[42] Fuller faced the challenge of reconciling her academic, European artistic training with the spiritual and philosophical priorities of theosophical thought.

[58][59] At some point following these travels, Fuller settled permanently in Mosman in Sydney's northern suburbs, where she continued to paint, including miniatures.

[32] In 1920, the Society of Women Painters in New South Wales established a School of Fine and Applied Arts, with Florence Fuller appointed as the inaugural teacher of life classes.

At the exhibition held to mark the school's establishment, Fuller displayed a portrait of the organisation's founder, Mrs Hedley Parsons.

[60] When the society held a show in 1926, a portrait by Fuller was one of those selected for favourable comment, but the general opinion of The Sydney Morning Herald reviewer was that "the exhibitors have let their style harden into a groove".

Gwenda Robb and Elaine Smith, in their Concise Dictionary of Australian Artists, considered Fuller's art to be created in "a free painterly style indebted to Impressionism".

[22] One reviewer thought very highly of her portraits, but was less convinced about Fuller's approach to the Australian light, writing:She had less success with our landscapes than with her figure subjects.

Compared to her earlier works, portraits painted at Adyar showed a reduced tonal range and a shift from academic portraiture to representation of the 'hidden inner life' of the subject.