For artists and the creatively-inclined, the Southern Highlands has long been a refuge from the confusion and clouding hubbub of the city. In 1948, fresh from a six-year elopement in Europe, the painter Alison Rehfisch moved to Berrima to paint its very English rolling hills and conifers with the man for whom she left her daughter and husband fifteen years earlier.
 
In 1933 Alison Rehfisch, consumed with love for her fellow art student George Duncan, had boarded a boat bound for London, leaving behind her 13-year-old daughter and her husband Rodney Rehfisch. Alison was a butterfly; dramatic, flamboyant and artistic. She smoked roll-your-own cigarettes and often had one hanging from her bottom lip. As her daughter remembered in an interview with Janet Hawley in 2002 'She was totally undomesticated, could only cook one dish, apple charlotte, and never did any housework.' She was a favourite on the bohemian scene, she had a city studio in the artists' quarter, and threw wild parties inspired by her lover George Duncan with her art-world friends, Norman Lindsay, William Dobell and Grace Cossington Smith. Lindsay painted a picture of one such party. Lindsay sent a copy of the picture to Rehfisch and inscribed it 'To Alison - with thanks for the best of all possible parties.' Like her better-known contemporaries Margaret Preston, Clarice Beckett, Thea Proctor, Grace Cossington Smith, Dorrit Black and Grace Crowley, Rehfisch devoted her life to art.
 
Duncan and Rehfisch were inseparable; they had met in 1922 at Julian Ashton's Art School and later moved in together, sharing a studio apartment in Bridge Street Sydney - Rehfisch was still married. They exhibited together in Sydney at Macquarie Galleries and in 1933, adventurous and hungry for knowledge, the pair travelled to London and joined the thriving expatriate artist community to study the great Modernist painters. Both exhibited widely and became important members of the London scene at the time. The two absorbed the influences of Europe for six years, but in 1939 Alison returned to Australia on news of the death of her husband. When Duncan returned to Australia, she finally married him in 1942, twenty years after their first meeting at Julian Ashton's.

The current exhibition focuses on the landscapes Alison and George produced during their time in Berrima and the Southern Highlands, with additional still-lifes from the late 1940s and 1950s. The collection, still owned by a member of the extended family, underscores the close links in their work, both in subject and application and is a celebration of the picturesque landscape of the Southern Highlands some half a century ago. 

Alison Rehfisch was a thoroughly modern artist who thrived in the bohemian culture of Sydney between the wars. Associating with artists such as Roland Wakelin, Grace Cossington Smith and Arthur Murch, Rehfisch was an important figure in the early Modernist movement in Australia. Known for her domestic still-lifes, nostalgic flower pieces and landscapes, there is a quiet intensity in her paintings. She was consistently concerned with colour and design as the underlying principles of painting. Rehfisch studied at the Julian Ashton Art School, then under Dattilo Rubbo. In 1933 she left her young family and moved to London, studying at the Grosvenor School. She travelled and painted in Europe for five years where she was influenced by the art of Cézanne, El Greco, Braque and Chagall. With her second husband and fellow-artist George Duncan, Rehfisch was an active organiser and exhibitor with the Contemporary Group, the Contemporary Art Society and the Society of Artists. Her move with Duncan to country NSW in 1947 sparked an interest in painting the landscapes around Berrima, Moss Vale, and Goulburn. She won the Royal Art Society prize for Still Life in 1929, and is represented in the National Gallery of Australia and the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; the Art Gallery of NSW; the Queensland Art Gallery; many regional gallery collections; the University of Western Australia; and Artbank.