[4] Later, at the Kyneton School of Mines, Hurry took lessons in drawing and wood carving, then studied watercolour painting with the Scottish-born artist, John Mather.

Farmer (1897-1989) was a close friend of fellow student 10 years younger, Justus Jorgensen, when both attended the National Gallery School in 1914, where he also met Clarice Beckett and Colin Colahan.

Hurry became a founding member of the original Twenty Melbourne Painters Society — Jas Stuart Anderson, Alice Bale, Elsie Barlow, Alexander Colquhoun, George Colville, Edith Downing, Bernice Edwell, William Frater, Henrietta Maria Gulliver, Carl Hampel, C.E.

Newbury, Clara Southern, Ruth Sutherland, Jo Sweatman, Isobel Tweddle, and Rose A. Walker — all supporters and students of Meldrum, which split from The Victorian Artists Society in protest at his defeat in the 1918 election for its president.

Twenty Melbourne Painters Society founding Secretary A.M.E. Bale declared:“We desire nothing but sincerity and a humble study of nature, from which alone all art, whether decorative or realistic, draws any enduring life.”[9]Also in 1921, Hurry entered the inaugural Archibald Prize,[10] in which 41 works were submitted and all exhibited from 17 January 1922 for two months.

The couple shared one of the purpose-built studios (Studio 2) at the 1888 Grosvenor Chambers, 9 Collins Street, Melbourne (its name a direct reference to Grosvenor Gallery of London) occupied also at various times by Meldrum, Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton, Percival Ball, Charles Francis Summers, Clara Southern, Jane Sutherland, Charles Conder, E. Phillips Fox, John Longstaff, Girolamo Nerli, Louis Abrahams, Rose Walker, George Lambert, and Ola Cohn.

[13][14] The result is Hurry's Temple Lantern at Nikko,[15] which handles the challenging geometry of the subject’s forms, and its spatial relations with two Japanese maple trunks that embrace it, with planes confidently rendered, following Meldrum's principles, in incremental, limited steps of earth and grey tones, against an abstracted background of soft-focus greens.

[17] In late 1923, inviting Meldrum and his family to stay in their house, Hurry and her husband set out for Europe, arriving first of all in Paris, where they were reunited with the Jorgensons and the Colquhouns.

Returning to Australia in 1926, Hurry showed 57 works jointly with Farmer whose taste for Old Masters was reinforced by his encounters with Modernism in Europe, and, after her election to the Melbourne Society of Woman Painters and Sculptors she exhibited with them from 1927 to 1962.

Also with Farmer in 1927 she showed “thumbnail sketches” in Margaret MacLean's studio gallery, 450 Collins Street with Elsie Barlow, Jessie Traill, Nora Gurdon, Rosa A. Walker, Hilda Travers; artists identified by a reviewer as all “well-known.”[20] The couple returned to Paris and London 1932-35 and she found success at the French Salon in Paris in 1933, and still while away in 1934 showed her works alongside Meldrum, Clarice Beckett, Alma Figuerola, Justus Jorgenson and Percy Leason at the Athenaeum Gallery in Melbourne.

John Farmer (P. Hurry) has a cottage at Olinda as well as a studio in the city but despite her country setting she paints mostly portraits;”[21] referring to the Grosvenor Chambers which she occupied until 1959, and where during WW2 she showed in a short charity exhibition 6-11 May 1941.

"[25] On the couple's return from Europe in 1926, The Argus reported that;"Mrs Farmer shows landscapes, portraits, and still life, and she also has copied from the old masters, in her case Velasquez, and she hangs a study of the Infanta Marguerite by that painter.

"[28]Her near-life-size portrait Miss Joyce Wingate of 1929, which is (since 1987) in the collection of the V&A,[29] was in an October 1929 show at the Athenaeum of The Twenty Melbourne Painters, then numbering 27 as remarked by The Bulletin reviewer who describes “P.

The success of this picture just misses assurance through the imperfect treatment of the face, which is not carried sufficiently far to balance the handling of the dress and other accessories.”[38] In 1937, Harold Herbert in reviewing a brief June exhibition at the Athenaeum by the couple with sculptor John W.

"[39]Herbert seems to temper this opinion in his review shortly thereafter of the 28th annual exhibition of the Society of Women Painters in noting how Hurry in "two studies in the Meldrum manner demonstrates again her undoubted ability.