Bertha Merfield

Bertha Elizabeth Merfield (1869–1921) was an Australian painter, craft worker in metal and leather, and Art Nouveau muralist. She was a founding member of the Twenty Melbourne Painters Society, the British Society of Painters in Tempera, and the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria.

Merfield, born in Hawke Street, West Melbourne, Victoria on 30 January 1869 to Canadian Isabella (née Wardman) and Englishman Thomas Merfield, was the sister of Kate Hill Merfield, barrister Miriam (Myra) Sarah Merfield, the eleventh woman admitted to the Melbourne Bar, May, Percy, Thomas and Charles James Merfield F.R.A.S., astronomer at the Melbourne Observatory and a founder, and first president, of the Astronomical Society of Victoria.

After her birth her family lived in Ararat and Cemetery Road, Stawell, where Bertha first studied art, and sometime after her father's death on 20 October 1888, they moved to Melbourne.