Margaret Olley’s friendships with artists are chronicled in their pictures of her, such as William Dobell’s 1948 Archibald Prize–winning painting, works by Russell Drysdale and Jeffrey Smart and, much later, Ben Quilty’s 2011 Archibald Prize–winning portrait.
No other subject has won the Archibald twice (self-portraits by Brett Whiteley and William Robinson aside), and the 63-year span between Dobell’s and Quilty’s pictures is a true reflection of Olley’s enduring influence on other artists.
Olley had a great capacity for friendship, not only with other artists — with whom she made many convivial sketching and painting excursions — but also with supporters and dealers. These lifelong friendships were strengthened by a process of exchange and mutual recognition.
William Dobell Study for ‘Portrait of Margaret Olley’ 1948
William Dobell ‘Margaret Olley’1948
Margaret Olley & William Dobell 1965
Early friendships with artists in Sydney found expression in Dobell’s 1948 Archibald Prize–winning portrait Margaret Olley, which made Olley an unwilling art-world celebrity. Dobell picked Olley for his famous 1949 Archibald Prize–winning portrait after Loudon Sainthill had an exhibition at Macquarie Galleries in Sydney. He sent her an invitation saying, ‘Darling Olley, please come dressed as a duchess’. Fabric, however, was in short supply after the war — only parachute silk was available. Fellow artist Fred Jessup gave Olley the sleeves from his grandmother’s wedding dress, and she pieced them together with parachute silk to make herself an outfit. In the end, she was a very successful duchess. After the exhibition there was a party until dawn at Russell Drysdale’s place in Rose Bay. When Olley and Dobell were going back in the tram together to Circular Quay, he said he’d like to paint her. So she went along to his studio wearing an ordinary beige dress and one of her rather extravagant hats. She only had one sitting. When she finally saw the painting, Dobell painted her in the duchess dress.
Her friendships extended to a later generation, too, as she acquired the works of younger artists, including Cressida Campbell, Nicholas Harding and Ben Quilty.
Ben Quilty Sketches of Margaret Olley 2011
Ben Quilty ‘Margaret Olley’ 2011
Ben Quilty with Margaret Olley 2011
These artists, in turn, also created portraits of Olley, including Quilty’s 2011 depiction of her which, like Dobell’s before it, won the Archibald Prize. While Dobell’s portrait presents Olley in an almost full-length fancy dress and an elaborate hat, Quilty’s is an unflinching close-up of a sun-damaged and truthfully aged face. In both, Olley’s bright eyes command the viewer.
Olley liked Ben Quilty’s work, she judged Quilty in the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship when he was only 29, she loved his thick use of paint. The Archibald Prize–winning portrait he made of Olley in 2011 just thrilled her so much. She said, ‘I’ve got life bookends — an Archibald at the beginning and an Archibald at the end’.
Ian Fairweather
Olley is also present in Ian Fairweather’s cryptically titled painting MO, PB and the ti-tree 1965, and was one of only a few people invited to visit the reclusive artist on Bribie Island. A bridge connecting Bribie Island to the mainland had opened in 1963, making the pilgrimage to Fairweather’s studio faster and easier for his artworld acquaintances. Olley respected Fairweather’s privacy, and only ever visited him with a few other people she felt would be of interest to the artist.
Ian Fairweather ‘MO, PB and the ti-tree’ 1965
Russell Drysdale
Olley was a very popular figure in the Australian art scene, her portrait was painted by several Australian modernists. Olley was also the subject of Russell Drysdale’s portrait in 1948, the same year William Dobell won the Archibald Prize, while much later Jeffrey Smart would paint Second Study for Margaret Olley in the Louvre Museum 1994–95.
Russell Drysdale ‘Portrait of Margaret Olley in blue dress’ 1940s
Russell Drysdale Margaret Olley 1948
Jeffrey Smart ‘Head study for portrait of Margaret Olley’ 1994
Jeffrey Smart ‘Margaret Olley in the Louvre Museum’ 1994–95
The influence of Margaret Olley AC (1923–2011) on the history of twentieth-century Australian art exceeds even the impressive body of work she produced during her lifetime. Now, as during her long and productive career, Olley remains widely admired for her luminous, life-affirming approach to painting, and the constancy and bravura with which she pursued her intimiste vision. She was equally cherished for her roles as artist’s muse, discerning mentor and tireless donor.
Russell Drysdale ‘Portrait of Margaret Olley in blue dress’ 1940s
Each of these aspects of her life in art was characterised by a demonstrative generosity and an abiding interest in others. To those who knew her, Olley was an ebullient, highly engaged figure, as frankly determined in her views about the world as she was exacting in her critiques. Art, and painting in particular, was central to Olley’s being. It enabled her to cope with the burden of loss, while allowing her to share her profound love of nature and beauty.
Olley is revered across Australia, however her lifelong connections with Brisbane is where her love of art was seeded and lifelong friendships formed. She was born in Lismore, and in her early years her family moved between northern New South Wales and north Queensland. She attended Somerville House, a Brisbane girls boarding school, and in the early 1940s studied art at Brisbane Central Technical College. There Olley gained a reputation for circumventing the strictures of the academy, albeit she later graduated with first-class honours from what would become the National Art School in Sydney. Clearly, her art teacher at Somerville, Caroline Barker, who had trained at Melbourne’s National Gallery School and was a distinguished artist in her own right, had recognised more than Olley’s uncommon facility with drawing and painting.
Olley began exhibiting as a solo artist in 1948, and for the next three decades Brian Johnstone was her Brisbane gallerist, until the Johnstone Gallery’s closure in 1972. Since 1975 Olley has been represented by Philip Bacon Galleries. Her family home Farndon, in Morry Street, Hill End (now West End), near the Brisbane River, would remain an important touchstone for Olley after it tragically burnt down in 1980 and she relocated permanently to New South Wales.
Margaret Olley 1966
Margaret Olley ‘Interior IV’ 1970
Olley’s struggled with depression in Sydney in the early 2000s, she ultimately overcame it to continue painting and, among other things, settle into her role as a noted mentor. Like Caroline Barker, Olley cared deeply about the development of young artists, including Cressida Campbell and Ben Quilty, and art museum directors such as Nick Mitzevich, in whom she saw passion and promise.
Margaret Olley and Ben Quilty 2005
Olley developed an acute sense of the endless formal and expressive possibilities of the still life, while approaching her interiors of Farndon and her later Sydney residence in Duxford Street, Paddington, as putative self portraits. Olley’s more formally structured self-portraits, often depicted in mirrors, are replete with the curios and objets d’art that filled her homes. They bear witness to her incessant collecting habit, a kind of material evidence of her relentless search for beauty. In that, it is impossible not to compare her artistic project and preoccupations with those of French Intimist artists Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940) and Pierre Bonnard (1867 1947). From within the confines of a modest home-based studio, barely more home than studio, an entire world of pictorial potential emerged.
Margaret Olley ‘Bedroom still life’ 1997
Other intriguing currents in Olley’s work, a series of nudes of young Aboriginal women, scandalous when first shown in conservative Brisbane in 1962, adopted an individualised approach to her sitter that was unusual for the more trenchantly modernist time, only a few years on from Arthur Boyd’s now iconic ‘Brides’ series. Composed in a manner that descends from Titian in the sixteenth century to Édouard Manet in the late nineteenth, they remind us of Olley’s constant attention to the history of art when framing and rephrasing her subjects within a particular genre.
Frequent sojourns to the great galleries of Europe, particularly in France and England — one, in 1998, with the sole purpose of seeing a major new Bonnard survey at the Tate — and three visits to Papua New Guinea in the 1960s also provided inspiration for Olley. She was, on any measure, an inveterate traveller who integrated a multitude of objets d’art, exhibition posters, reproductions of favourite works and collectables into her compositions, as testament to her interest and enquiry in the world. Few Australian artists have so successfully incorporated exhibition posters and reproductions of favourite works (particularly those of Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne and Édouard Manet) into their own work to such authentic and visually compelling effect. Olley’s inclusion of these images is a generous gesture, an aesthetic homage that is as far from a postmodernist reflex as it could be. Despite an infamously chaotic domestic space in Duxford Street, in which we might otherwise strain to see these same images and objects, they became vital players in Olley’s iconography.
William Dobell ‘Margaret Olley’ 1948
Ben Quilty ‘Margaret Olley’ 2011
Her friendships with artists are chronicled in their pictures of her, such as William Dobell’s 1948 Archibald Prize–winning painting, works by Russell Drysdale and Jeffrey Smart and, much later, Ben Quilty’s 2011 Archibald winning portrait. No other subject has won the Archibald twice (self portraits by Brett Whiteley and William Robinson aside), and the 63-year span between Dobell’s and Quilty’s pictures is a true reflection of Olley’s enduring influence on other artists. She is also present in Scottish-born artist Ian Fairweather’s cryptically titled painting MO, PB and the ti-tree 1965 (MO: Margaret Olley), and was one of only a few people invited to visit the reclusive artist on Bribie Island.
Ian Fairweather ‘MO, PB and the ti-tree’ 1965
Her love of Cézanne, Bonnard, Giorgio Morandi and Edgar Degas, among others, ripples through not only our nation’s...
