Provenance: Artist's Estate Collection

Adele Younghusband was born in Te Awamutu, the daughter of a local politician/farmer and the niece of botanical painter, Fanny Osborne. From an early age Adele's artistic leanings were obvious. Against her family's wishes she learnt photography, working as a photographic retoucher in Hamilton. In 1905 she married Frank Younghusband, a grocer and the couple moved to Auckland where Adele joined the Auckland Society of Arts in 1909. The couple separated in 1917 and by 1919 Adele was living in Whangarei and supporting her three children as a successful portrait photographer. With fellow photographer/artist George Woolley, Adele founded the Whangarei Art Society. In later life Adele donated a collection of her work to the city of Whangarei.

As a single mother during the depression years of the early 1930s she worked in Dargaville and Tauranga before eventually returning to Hamilton. She was in her forties before being able to fully commit to painting.

In 1934 Adele and Ida Carey founded the Waikato Society of Arts. The late 1930s saw her exhibiting in Sydney and studying painting under George Bell at the Bourke Street Studio School, Melbourne. Bell was a leading spokesman for 'modern art.' Adele's successful Auckland exhibition of 1941 was followed by the establishment of her Panmure-based studio from where she worked for the next twenty years. An artist of competence and versatility she is acknowledged as an early pioneer of surrealism, adept in many mediums who explored diverse subject matter with originality.

In the catalogue introduction to the 2008 exhibition The Cursive Line: Adele Younghusband, curated by Scott Pothan and toured by the Whangarei Art Museum, Peter McLeavey writes: ... she was greatly gifted .... during a fairly short creative life she produced a number of images, which to me give her immortality. They have a power, strength and vigor which mark them as icons of her time, of our land in the 1930s and 1940s.

Adele Younghusband died in Auckland in her early nineties. Her work is represented in public and private collections