With the 2023 Archibald Prize recently announced, we delve into Australia’s oldest portrait award hosted by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Since 1921 the prize has attracted National interest, controversy, court cases and continually sparks numerous debates, so to celebrate we’ve made a list of works from the QAGOMA Collection with a link to the yearly prize.
Exhibited 1936 | Melville Haysom ‘Self portrait’
Melville Haysom originally a professional musician who played violin, clarinet and saxophone in the Melbourne Regent Theatre Orchestra and in various jazz bands, moved to Brisbane when Hoyts opened the Regent Theatre in Queen Street, in the early 1930s. In 1939 he purchased a 70-acre dairy farm ‘Merri Merri’ on Mt Cootha, then an outer Brisbane suburb. At the start of World War II he joined the full-time Volunteer Defence Force and became an instructor in bomb disposal and latter mapping and field sketching. After the war he set up a private art school on the farm using the barn as a studio. Haysom was appointed Senior Instructor in Painting and Drawing at the Brisbane Central Technical College (now Queensland University of Technology) in 1948 until he retired in 1966.
A keen equestrian his 1937 Self portrait finalist in the Archibald Prize depicts the artist in the posture of the ‘Grand manner’ or ‘Swagger’ portrait, attired in tailored riding jacket, pants with riding crop. The Sydney Morning Herald article of 16 January 1937 on the Archibald Prize stated that: ‘Melville Haysom has achieved an extraordinary dramatic effect in his self-portrait, through the use of massed blacks, with a strong outline, against a light background. Perhaps the result is a shade theatrical; but at least the method has individuality in it.’
Exhibited 1943 | William Bustard ‘Tippo Powder’
William Bustard’s Tippo Powder, Queensland Police tracker was a finalist in the 1943 Archibald Prize. Bustard met ‘Tippo’ (Timothy) Powder and established a friendship with him while Bustard was working with a World War II camouflage unit in Rockhampton in 1942. Powder worked for the Police Department in Rockhampton in the years 1942-44 before returning to his home at Woorabinda, Central Queensland. Shortly thereafter Bustard was transferred to Townsville to work at the Garbutt Airforce Base where this portrait was probably painted. A member of the Darumbal (Jetimarala) language group, Powder was born in 1914 at Yatton Station near Marlborough. He worked initially as a stockman.
‘Tippo’ Powder is depicted in the pride of his professional capacity, glancing purposefully to the left, with his broad brimmed, practical hat shading his face and his stock-whip curled around his fingers. Though this is clearly a studio portrait, the leaves intruding from the right and the impressionistically brushed ground give the impression that Powder has been captured taking a moment of rest whilst ‘on the job’ in the bush.
Exhibited 1945 | Douglas Dundas ‘David Strachan’
A finalist in the 1945 Archibald Prize, Douglas Dundas described his portrait of David Strachan as his best ‘… he was so patient, so good a sitter. He understood what it was like to get into an interesting pose.’
Dundas was awarded the New South Wales Society of Artists Traveling Scholarship in 1927 and subsequently studied in London at the London Polytechnic in 1928-29 and briefly in Paris with André Lhote. On his return in 1929 he worked for a short time as an illustrator for a newspaper, before being appointed in 1930 to the staff of the East Sydney Technical College, later the National Art School in Sydney. He remained there until 1965 as a major force in the training of several generations of Sydney artists.
David Strachan was an accomplished artist in his own right and friend of Dundas. Author Lou Klepac, in the foreword to David Strachan (1993), describes his paintings as achieving ‘a strange charged atmosphere which has little to do with surrealism, but is nonetheless close to that strange, unreal atmosphere of dreams’. Imbued with a poetic dimension, his paintings reflect Strachan’s own introspective personality.
Winner: Archibald Prize 1955 | Ivor Hele ‘Robert Campbell’
Ivor Hele was a renowned portrait painter, who won the Archibald Prize five times in seven years. Appointed official war artist during World War II while serving in the Middle East — his paintings graphically captured the combat in which he participated as artist-soldier. Will Ashton who had been Director of the National Art Gallery of New South Wales from 1937-44 described Hele as having ‘the gift of being able, almost as though by some mental communication, to attune himself to every one of his subjects. There is no doubt that this enables him to capture ‘mood’ and this, in turn, gives his paintings vitality’.
The Melbourne Argus, Saturday 21 January 1956 reported; ‘South Australian artist, Ivor Hele today won the 1955 £500 Archibald Prize for the fourth time, and the third year in succession. The 44-year-old Hele’s winning entry was a portrait of Mr Robert Campbell, South Australian National Art Gallery director.’ Campbell also an artist, had earlier in 1949, been appointed the first director of the Queensland National Art Gallery.
Winner: Archibald Prize 1956 | William Dargie ‘Albert Namatjira’
Sir William Dargie was undoubtedly Australia’s most prominent painter of ‘academic’ portraits. He established his reputation during the 1940s and 50s, during which time he was awarded the Archibald Prize eight times. Portrait of Albert Namatjira depicting the famous Arrernte artist won the Archibald Prize in 1956.
Dargie had first encountered Namatjira in the early 1950s when he painted with him in Central Australia several times. Namatjira was ten years Dargie’s senior, and both were famous artists in Australia at the time. A mutual respect developed between the two men with Namatjira later agreeing to sit for Dargie. Dargie recalled: ‘We had agreed that he was going to sit for me. I liked his natural rebelliousness.’ In November 1956 they were photographed in a Sydney art supply shop...
By telling the story of Australian Art, we can observe the changing nature of portraiture — the shift from democratic modes such as the nineteenth-century photograph, to oil paintings produced after a number of sittings and preparatory sketches. These portraits tell stories of contact between cultures, including colonial and immigrant experiences. Many of these stories connect to the history of Queensland, through the artists and their chosen subjects.
Swedish-born artist Oscar Friström, a professional artist working in Queensland in the late nineteenth century, was known for his portraiture, including those of Aboriginal subjects. Friström’s Duramboi 1893 depicts James Davis, a young convict sent from Scotland to Australia. Davis escaped from a Moreton Bay penal colony in 1829 and lived with several Indigenous groups in the area, particularly on Fraser Island (where he was known as Duramboi), until he was found in 1842. During this time, Davis learned many languages and customs, and was treated as an honoured guest.
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Portraiture was a major artistic genre in Australia during the nineteenth century. Portrait of Richard Edwards is a typical colonial portrait, however documented works by Queensland colonial artists are of exceptional rarity. This painting is of even greater interest as it is the first work by Auschar Chauncy to be identified. The subject of this portrait is Richard Edwards who was the Queensland Member of Parliament for Oxley between 1901-13. This portrait must have been one of Chauncy’s first commissions in Brisbane as it depicts Edwards as a vigorous young man in his thirties, presumably painted shortly after the Edwards family arrived in Brisbane.
Besides nineteenth-century portraits of European settlers, those from the twenty-first century include William Yang’s ‘About my mother’ portfolio, from 2003, which accounts for the life of this second-generation, Chinese–Australian woman, who raised the artist in Dimbulah, in far north Queensland.
The text with Mother driving car reads: I ran Bessie’s household. I did all the running around. I learned to drive a car. Bessie never learned to drive a car. She never wanted to. The text with Me and Alan, living room. Graceville reads: At Dimbulah we all learned the piano. It was part of our social life. I was the one who advanced the furthest. I got to sixth grade. None of us play the piano now. My mother had dreams of me being a concert pianist.
In his ‘About my mother’ portfolio, Yang has assembled a suite of photographs of his mother Emma. Some are his own, while others have been re-photographed from images found and collected from family albums over the years. Yang described his process of collecting the photographs as ‘partly being a researcher, like a historian in some way.’ Yang began the ‘About my mother’ series following his mother’s death. The handwritten, reflective text, similar to a spoken narrative, includes the artist’s memories, conversations and anecdotes. The text in Mother driving car. Cairns 1930’s 2003 refers to his mother’s sister Bessie, whom she was close to and assisted during ill health. Through the text and images, Yang gives us a sense of Emma as a strong and proud woman, but we also experience the artist’s struggle to find, in a photograph, his mother’s true essence.
Brisbane artist Michael Zavros’s self-portrait Bad dad 2013 in which the artist — the son of a Greek Cypriot father and Australian mother — floats idly in a backyard pool, Zavros makes playful reference to the mythical Greek Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection.
Dr Kyla McFarlane is former Head of Australian Art, QAGOMA
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Feature image detail: Auschar Chauncy Portrait of Richard Edwards 1874
