Ellenor Corbet nee Ough

Her married name was Corbet, taken from her second husband’s name, while her birth name was Edith Edenborough, and she was born in Australia on December 28, 1846. Edith’s father was a sea captain and merchant in hosiery and silk from Leicestershire, England, who plied his trade between Australia and England in the 1830s. Her mother was Margaret Stedman, and she bore him six children, four boys and two girls; Edith being the fifth child. The family lived in a very nice home in Goulburn, New South Wales from 1840 until 1854, which they sold right before they moved back to England to an area called Kensington. Her father died in 1855, at the age of 43, and census records show her at age 14 with her mother, and then at age 24 living with her older sister in Kensington.

She was also 24 years old when she began exhibiting her paintings in London. There are no details on where she studied art, or who she studied with in her youth, but she became a Victorian landscape painter and married Arthur Murth, who was also a Victorian landscape artist. Together they moved to Rome, and Edith became associated with a group of artists there who called themselves the Macchiaioli. They were also called the Etruscans or the Tuscans, and their leader was Giovanni Costa. Edith and Costa were close friends and painted together out-of-doors, as was one of the painting practices of the group. The idea was to capture the light’s natural effects on their subjects and to allow for painting a panoramic view. Venice was listed as one of their cities that they visited together while in Italy.

Edith regularly participated in painting exhibits in the New Gallery and Grosvenor Gallery during the 1880s. Three of her more well-known paintings of women are The Sleeping Girl, The Goat Girl, and Bacchante, and she also painted landscapes, including Cockatoos at Ockham and Cicero's Villa and the Bay of Baiae. Her husband, Arthur, died (date unknown) and she married again in 1891 to Matthew Ridley Corbet. He also happened to be a leading member of the Macchiaioli group and so they lived in London but traveled to Italy often. After her marriage to Corbet, Edith mainly exhibited her paintings at the Royal Academy. She passed away at the age of 74 in a hospital in Hampstead, North West London, in England.