Dora Meeson Coates, painter, cartoonist, illustrator and craftworker, was born in Melbourne on 7 August 1869, the eldest surviving daughter of John Thomas Meeson, headmaster of Hawthorn Grammar School, and Amelia née Kipling. The Meeson family was constantly on the move between 1876 and 1896, living in London, New Zealand and Melbourne, and Dora was mainly educated at home. In the late 1880s she drew four crude watercolours over two pages of Australian Aborigines (NLA). One page shows three Aborigines wearing cloaks in their wirly (top) and two Aboorigines fishing from a bark canoe (bottom); the other depicts a large group of Aborigines in the bush (top) and three portrait busts (bottom). All seem to have been copied from photographs.

Dora studied at the Christchurch School of Art (NZ), then at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, where an unconfirmed story states that she was outright or equal first in the 1896 National Gallery Travelling Scholarship competition but withdrew in favour of George Coates , her future husband. She studied intermittently at London's Slade School of Art in 1896-98 then in Paris at the Académie Julian in 1898-99. In 1898 her Portrait of M'selle M… was hung at the Old Salon and she became secretly engaged to Coates. In 1900 the Meeson family returned to London. Dora married George there three years later.

An ardent feminist who sought financial independence, Meeson became the principal breadwinner by painting a broad range of popular subjects for the market, including sentimental topics, studies of children, tourist souvenirs and rural scenes. In her Thames River paintings, e.g. The Thames at Chelsea (1916), she attempted to break down the social barriers that limited women artists to domestic subjects by appropriating subject matter usually the preserve of male artists – marine painting – and her pictures show scenes of the smog-laden industrial waterfront where women's presence was normally considered unacceptable. Mindful of East End poverty, she also recorded the vulnerability of working men to storms and accident. A group of 'social conscience' paintings aimed to draw attention to official discrimination against underprivileged women, women war-workers and women artists.

Painter Dora Meeson was born in Hawthorn, Melbourne, Australia in 1869, the daughter of John Thomas Meeson, then a schoolmaster, later a barrister, and his wife Amelia (née Kipling). She grew up in New Zealand, then attended the National Gallery School in Melbourne, Australia in 1895, also studying intermittently in London at the Slade School of Fine Art, under Henry Tonks, between 1896 and 1898, and then in Paris at the Académie Julian from 1898-99. During her time in France, she became engaged to fellow Australian artist George James Coates (1869–1930), and they moved to England in 1900, but could not afford to marry until some three years later in June 1903. The couple settled in Ealing, west London, for several years, before moving to Chelsea, to be nearer to the centre of the art world. Here they joined an extensive circle of Australian expatriate artists including Tom Roberts, George Lambert, Ruby Lindsay, Bess Norris and Ola Cohn and their studio, at 52 and 55 Glebe Place, became a hub for social and political functions including large parties and private views of their work.

In 1907 Meeson subscribed to the Women's Social and Political Union and, through the suffrage movement, befriended Mary Lowndes and Christiana Herringham, co-founder of the Society of Painters in Tempera. Meeson later became a member of the Artists' Suffrage League and a socialist and joined the Women's Freedom League as soon as it was formed. In 1907 she won a poster competition organised by the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies and the Artists' Suffrage League, subsequently painting the 1908 London suffrage march union banner and designing posters and postcards to publicise similar marches. In 1909 she contributed powerful (and now very scarce) line drawings to the Artists' Suffrage League publications Beware! A Warning to Suffragists and A.B.C. of Politics for Women Politicians. To earn money, Meeson and her husband contributed black and white illustrations to Dr. H. S. Williams's Historians' History of the World and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Aware that their exclusion from the Chelsea Arts Club prevented women from accessing competitive professional commissions, Meeson undertook such commissions whenever she could, and forced the inclusion of women artists in the competition to decorate Chelsea Town Hall in 1912. She fought actively against the pervasive prejudice that if women were to paint, then they should restrict themselves to demure subjects befitting their domestic experience, choosing instead to depict labouring and shipping scenes on the River Thames; a political act, in which she laid claim to subjects traditionally reserved for men. This included going out on a boat in all weathers and battling against storm clouds and prevailing winds in order to paint active views of the river at firsthand, rather than settling for a 'tame' view from the riverbank (several of these drawings were acquired after 1945 by the Port of London Authority)....

She became a founding member of the Women's Freedom League (Kensington Branch), a member of the Women's Council of the Conservative and Unionist Women's Franchise Association, and a member of the Artists' Suffrage League. For the last she illustrated booklets, designed political posters and postcards and painted the Commonwealth of Australia's Suffrage Banner, "Trust the Women Mother As I Have Done" (oil paint on green hessian), which was made for and carried at the head of the ANZWVC Contingent in the Women's Suffrage Coronation Procession on 17 June 1911 – the biggest procession of all.

George James Coates... studied art under W. Dellit at the North Melbourne School of Design before attending evening drawing classes under F. McCubbin at the National Gallery School. In 1895-96 Coates studied painting under L. Bernard Hall, acquiring both respect for the painter's craft and the approach of the Munich School - qualities that formed the basis for his later development. He won a travelling scholarship in 1896 and went to London next year before moving to Paris, where he worked at the Académie Julian and studied under Jean Paul Laurens. In Paris Coates renewed an acquaintance with a fellow art student, Dora Meeson (1869-1955), who arrived in 1898. She was born on 7 August 1869 at Hawthorn, Melbourne, daughter of John Thomas Meeson, schoolmaster, later barrister, and his wife Amelia, née Kipling, and grew up in New Zealand. A student at the Melbourne National Gallery School, and later the Slade School, London, Dora studied in Paris under Benjamin Constant and Laurens. The couple were engaged in France but could not afford to marry until 23 June 1903, some three years after their move to London. They resolved not to have children but to devote themselves to their artistic careers.

Coates and Meeson established themselves in Chelsea where they became members of an extensive circle of Australian expatriate artists. To earn money they contributed black and white illustrations to Dr H. S. Williams's Historians' History of the World and the Encyclopaedia Britannica....

Coates died suddenly in London of a stroke on 27 July 1930. A memorial exhibition of his work was opened in May 1931 at the New Burlington Galleries by Lord Birdwood. His wife continued an active artistic career until her death in London on 24 March 1955. The two were buried together in Rye cemetery.

Between 1896 and 1898 Dora studied in London, at the Slade School. In 1903 she married an Australian artist, George Coates, and they lived in Chelsea in the studio whose previous tenant had been Augustus John, with whom Dora had been a fellow pupil at the Slade. Dora described the Trafalgar Studios as "a nest of busy workers" and it was here that by chance she met Mary Sargant Florence on an evening when the latter was looking for a suffrage meeting being held in a neighbouring studio. This was probably the one belonging to Florence Haig, an artist and militant member of the Women's Social and Political Union, who became one of Dora's close friends... It was in Florence's studio, at a suffrage meeting at which Mrs Pankhurst was the principal speaker that Dora first met Cicely Hamilton, with whom she would later work on two ASL publications.

As Dora wrote: "George and I threw ourselves heart and soul into the suffrage movement and in 1907 she was a founder member of the Artist's Suffrage League. Working with Mary Lowndes in the ASL she met Christiana Herringham, the founder of the Tempera Society, Annie Swynnerton, and Emily Ford, with whom for a time she shared a studio. She wrote that she avoided doing anything really militant because her husband would have upset if she had gone to prison.

Suffrage Atelier: Mrs Meeson Coates will be At Home at Glebe Studios, 55 Glebe Place, King's Road, Chelsea, on Tuesday, October 15, from 3.30 p.m. There will be an exhibition of posters and other pictorial work. Mrs Louise Fagan has kindly consented to speak.

A very pleasant and well-attended function was the "At Home" of the Suffrage Atelier held at the Chelsea Studios by kind invitation of Mrs. Messon Coates. A large number of Suffragists of all shades gathered to press forward the poster and pictorial campaign which the organisation has so successfully carried on for a considerable time, greatly to the advantage of all other societies, who benefit by this form of advertisement and illustration.

Mrs. Fagan, addressing the gathering, made an appeal for money to pay a secretary and a traveller. She felt that the worst sweated labour she knew of was involved in the production of these posters. A traveller was wanted, a woman with charming manners and a determined effort to visit branches of all Suffrage societies, her idea being that every branch of every society should have at least one poster on hoarding near their shop, or even their private address, of meetings, at a cost of £2 per year.