Dorothy Kate Richmond

Dorothy Kate Richmond (12 September 1861 – 16 April 1935), sometimes known as Dolla Richmond, was a New Zealand painter best known for her watercolours of flowers and landscapes. Working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she matters both for her art and for her role as a teacher and an active figure in Wellington's artistic community.

Born in Parnell, Auckland, she spent much of her childhood in Nelson, in an unsettled family life shaped by her mother's death and her father's frequent absences. Her father, who encouraged her interest in drawing and painting, took her to Europe in 1873. She studied at Bedford College for Women in London and at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she worked under Alphonse Legros and won a Slade Scholarship by 1880. Back in New Zealand she became art mistress at the newly opened Nelson College for Girls in 1883 and began exhibiting with the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in 1885.

After her father died in 1898 she was financially independent and returned to Europe to paint. In 1901 she met Frances Hodgkins and travelled with her through France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Italy, the two returning to New Zealand in December 1903. Norman Garstin painted her portrait during that European period. In Wellington they rented a studio together in Bowen Street, where they also taught private pupils, and Richmond kept it on after Hodgkins left for Europe in 1906.

Her legacy lies largely in teaching and in local arts institutions. She taught at Fitzherbert Terrace School from about 1909 to 1924, sat on the council of the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, and was made a life member in 1928. She also supported fellow artists such as Hodgkins and Margaret Stoddart by buying their work.