Iso Rae

After training at Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria Art School, where she studied alongside Frederick McCubbin and Jane Sutherland, Rae travelled to France in 1887 with her family, and spent most of the rest of her life there.

Rae studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School from 1877 to 1887, where fellow students included Rupert Bunny and John Longstaff.

There she worked alongside a number of other Australian artists including Hilda Rix Nicholas, Rupert Bunny, Tudor St George Tucker, James Peter Quinn, Edward Officer, E. Phillips Fox and his wife Ethel Carrick, and others who took an interest in the Australians' work, such as Frenchman Jules Adler.

When in 1918 Australia first appointed official war artists, sixteen men were chosen; Rae, despite having lived in France for the duration of the conflict, was not included.

Most of these portrayed the Étaples Army Base Camp, "the largest of its kind ever established overseas by the British", which at its zenith housed 100,000, including hospital services for up to 22,000 patients.

[6] Most of the drawings are of nocturnal scenes, possibly because during the war Rae and her sister both worked in the Voluntary Aid Detachment, and would have had little spare time during the days.

[6] Few of these works were acquired by public galleries, with art historian Sasha Grishin arguing that they were "generally regarded as too intimate, too personal and too feminine to be included".

Snowden wrote: In her drawings she uses black outlines filled with flat areas of colour, a post-impressionist technique reminiscent of some of the French poster artists of the late nineteenth century...The regular patterning of men, tents and buildings in many of the works suggests the control that was imposed by the vast machine of men and modern war.

She was criticised for allowing her impressionist style to become extreme and visually distracting from her subjects, but that same approach was seen by another critic as charming, and exhibiting "harmonious colour and vigorous effects".