admirable exercises in formal organisation, the colours being sombre yet rich. Around this time, Bellette also held a show in Melbourne, which included some black-and-white landscape studies as well as some of her classical Greek subjects. Arnold Shore, art critic for The Argus, drew a contrast between the two groups of works. He thought that one of the landscapes "sets the heart singing with its lovely tone, pattern and sense of place". Continuing, he noted that the landscapes and some other works "attain at their best a standard only vaguely suggested when the painter concerned herself too much with striving after a new treatment of ancient Grecian ideals." Paintings by Bellette were among those of twelve Australian artists included in the 1953 Arts Council of Great Britain exhibition in London, five regional British cities, and at the Venice Biennale. Bellette was one of only two women represented, the other being Constance Stokes. As with her Sulman prize-winners, Bellette's subjects were classically themed works: Electra (1944) and Oedipus (1945). Arts Council chairman Kenneth Clark was disappointed with the response of British critics to the exhibition, and their focus on a theme of nationhood paid little regard to the works of Bellette and several others. As well as spending time in Sydney's art community, in 1954 Haefliger and Bellette purchased a cottage in Hill End, an old gold mining village in central New South Wales. They added a studio, and the site became both a weekender and a venue for social visits and artistic endeavours by colleagues from the Sydney circle, including Drysdale, Margaret Olley, John Olsen, David Edgar Strachan and Donald Friend. This gathering of artists, sometimes referred to as the Hill End Group, is known for its landscape art. Bellette, though sometimes a painter of landscapes, was known for her classical subjects and still lifes, which critics struggled to accommodate within their understanding of the Hill End Group. Nevertheless, several still lifes from this period are held in public collections, including Still Life with Fish (1954), in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, and Still life with wooden bowl (c. 1954), in the Art Gallery of New South Wales. These images were often rendered with strong colour, which was also sometimes a feature of earlier works on which critics would remark. Both Bellette and Haefliger had for many years been informal organisers of Sydney's artistic community. In 1955, Bellette helped