Bertha Everard (King)

Bertha (King) Everard trained initially as a concert pianist in Vienna but later studied painting at the Slade and Westminster art schools in London and the St Ives School of Landscape in Cornwall. She began teaching at the Staats Model School in Pretoria in 1902, but after marrying Charles Everard in 1903, moved with him to Bonnefoi, a small trading post on the Eastern Transvaal escarpment near Carolina.
In 1910, Everard won a gold medal at the South African National Union art exhibition in Johannesburg, organised by Florence Phillips, with a landscape painting in oils. She took her daughters to be educated in Europe in the 1920s and lived between England and Paris, exhibiting at the Royal Academy in London in 1923 and on the Paris Salon in 1924 and 1926. Everard returned to South Africa and life on the farm in 1926, painting mostly landscapes and exclusively in oils. Her work was shown at the Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg in 1936 and, in 1967, the Pretoria Art Museum held a prestige retrospective exhibition of the work of ‘The Everard Group’ ­– Bertha Everard, her daughters Ruth and Rosamund, and her sister Edith King.