"The Toilers"
Oil on Canvas
60x82cm
Signed Lower Left
Prov: Bruces Auctions
Private Collection Adelaide
$12,000-15,000
Born in 1922 on Coola Station near Mount Gambier, Edkins
was immersed from an early age in a world where horses
were essential to both work and daily life. Raised within a large pastoral property managed by her family, she developed not only a practical familiarity with stock work, but also an exceptional affinity with horses, later becoming an accomplished equestrienne in dressage and show jumping. This lived experience underpinned her artistic practice, grounding her work in observation rather than idealisation.
Encouraged in her artistic pursuits from childhood and later refining her training under the internationally recognised painter Harold Septimus Power, Edkins developed a disciplined realist approach. She became particularly known for her depictions of draught horses working the land, subjects rendered with both anatomical understanding and a sensitivity to movement and form.
Toilers sits firmly within this defining body of work, where the artist repeatedly returned to themes of labour, partnership, and the rhythms of rural industry. It is this authentic connection to her subject, drawn from a lifetime among horses that has secured Edkins’ reputation as one of Australia’s most accomplished realist painters of the rural tradition.
