Isobel Rae (18 August 1860 – 16 March 1940) was an Australian impressionist painter. After training at Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria Art School, where she studied alongside Frederick McCubbin and Jane Sutherland, Rae travelled to France in 1887 with her family, and spent most of the rest of her life there. A longstanding member of the Étaples art colony, Rae lived in or near the village of Étaples from the 1890s until the 1930s. During that period, Rae exhibited her paintings at the Royal Society of British Artists, the Society of Oil Painters, and the Paris Salon. During World War I, she was a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment and worked throughout the war in Étaples Army Base Camp. She and Jessie Traill were the only Australian women to live and paint in France during the war, however they were not included in their country's first group of official war artists. Following Hitler's rise to power, Rae moved to south-eastern England, where she died in 1940. Early life and training Rae was born on 18 August 1860 in Melbourne, youngest daughter of Scottish emigrants Thomas Rae, a manufacturer and later a state politician, and his wife Janet Love. She was the granddaughter of the Reverend Andrew Love and Catherine Love of Geelong, Victoria, Australia. Rae studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School from 1877 to 1887, where fellow students included Rupert Bunny and John Longstaff. Her teachers included George Folingsby and Oswald Rose Campbell. Rae had some academic success in student exhibitions, receiving prizes and recognition from the judging panel on several occasions, alongside fellow students such as Longstaff, Frederick McCubbin, Jane Sutherland and May Vale. Rae joined, and exhibited with, the Victorian Academy of Arts between 1881 and 1883. In 1887, Rae travelled to France and settled in Paris with her mother Janet and sister Alison. They lived there for three years, before the family moved to the artists' colony at the fishing village of Étaples, in northern coastal France. During this initial part of her career, Rae exhibited works in Australia and New Zealand, though she remained in Europe. Exhibitions in which she was hung included the 1889 New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition in Dunedin, and the 1896 Victorian Artists' Society, at which several of her landscapes were shown. Career Rae became a long-term resident at the Étaples colony. There she worked alongside