The following year they travelled to Europe, and Bellette (like Passmore) studied at the Westminster School of Art, where she was taught by figurative painters Bernard Meninsky and Mark Gertler.

[8] The couple became influential members of the Sydney Art Group, a network of "fashionable" moderns whose membership included William Dobell and Russell Drysdale.

[11] The judge awarding the prize actually preferred another of her entries, Electra, depicting the sister of Iphigenia also prominent in Greek tragedy – but it failed to meet the size requirements.

Her choice of subject matter and approach placed her at odds with mainstream modernism, while she seemed to shun explicit links between the classical and the Australian.

[12] Critics identified the influence of European modernists Aristide Maillol and Giorgio de Chirico, as well as Italian Quattrocento painters Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, about some of whom Bellette wrote articles in the journal Art in Australia.

Purchased by the National Gallery of Australia in 1976, this oil painting shows five figures, "posed like statues in a tableau vivant, [and who] possess a kind of erotic energy".

[13] Anne Gray, the National Gallery's curator, interpreted the scene chosen by Bellette: Although nothing is happening in this image, we associate the figures with tragedy, with death and mourning – with the classical reference in the painting's title.

Iphigenia, Agamemnon's daughter, gave her life for her country when the goddess Artemis asked for it in exchange for favourable winds so that the Greek ships could sail to Troy.

Describing her 1950 exhibition at the Macquarie Galleries, one critic considered it "one of the most stimulating and refreshing that has been seen here for a long time" and that "She paints with a strong, sombre palette and her forms are sculptured with great decision.

The clear, strong light tends to flatten the form and bleach the colour; a problem that doesn't lend itself to the dramatic tensions and dark moods that are characteristic of her work.

Continuing, he noted that the landscapes and some other works "attain at their best a standard only vaguely suggested when the painter concerned herself too much with striving after a new treatment of ancient Grecian ideals.

"[27] Paintings by Bellette were among those of twelve Australian artists included in the 1953 Arts Council of Great Britain exhibition in London, five regional British cities, and at the Venice Biennale.

Arts Council chairman Kenneth Clark was disappointed with the response of British critics to the exhibition, and their focus on a theme of nationhood paid little regard to the works of Bellette and several others.

[30] As well as spending time in Sydney's art community, in 1954 Haefliger and Bellette purchased a cottage in Hill End, an old gold mining village in central New South Wales.

They added a studio, and the site became both a weekender and a venue for social visits and artistic endeavours by colleagues from the Sydney circle, including Drysdale, Margaret Olley, John Olsen, David Edgar Strachan and Donald Friend.

This work was acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in the year it was exhibited in Melbourne,[39] one of a number of shows in which Bellette participated in Australia through the 1960s.

[1] This was in part because of a transition in Australian art that included the rise of abstract expressionism, the strong influence of a small number of gallery owners, and discrimination against women that reached "record levels".

When her work was hung at the South Yarra Gallery in 1964, noted art historian and critic Bernard Smith stated in his review for The Age that he "could not recall an exhibition in Melbourne of this quality since I began to write this column.

"[42] Reviewing her 1966 show in Sydney, the Herald critic considered it was her "ability to combine the calm beauty of form of her beloved classicism of content with a dark romantic spirit that has gained her such an honourable place in Australian painting...the antiquity of nature and man's constructions are explored with a subtle, powerful inquiry.

For although these rocky, shadowed landscapes are peopled with the ghosts and shades of an ancient civilisation, they are also curiously symbolic of present day tensions and tragedies.

[51] Historian Geoffrey Dutton was unconvinced about her choice of subject but praised Bellette's "assured if muted" style, while dismissing the lesser efforts of her husband.