Archie 100

One of the most popular subjects in the Archibald Prize are portraits of other artists. In fact, 34 portraits of artists – including 13 self-portraits – have won the award from 1921 to 2021. Throughout the century these portrayals have signalled both collegiality and respect among Australian artists, occasionally matched with spirited rivalry. Archibald painters are always on the lookout for their next subject and no one relates better to the process of creating a portrait – the live sitting, the sketches, the decisions about pose, light and setting – than their fellow practitioners.

Group portraits of artists, although rare in the Archibald, often convey an air of creative vigour and synergy, affirming artistic friendship and camaraderie. Combining multiple portraits in one artwork, they also provide an opportunity for the painter to experiment with the formal aspect of composition while suggesting interaction – and possibly collaboration – between the sitters.

Portrait of Miss DK Richmond

Harry Linley Richardson, Surrey-born son of artist George Richardson and Mary Linley, pursued art training in London through Goldsmiths’ College then Westminster School of Art, before finishing studies at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1900. He worked as a painter, illustrator and teacher before emigrating to Aotearoa New Zealand in 1908, where he was appointed an art instructor at Wellington Technical College.

With a keen interest in Māori culture, Richardson is noted for his detailed and precise portraits of distinguished Māori. He is one of nine artists based in Aotearoa known to have exhibited in the Archibald, from Annie Elizabeth Kelly in 1922 to John Ward Knox in 2020.

This work, Richardson’s only entry in the Archibald Prize, portrays Dorothy Kate Richmond (1861–1935), a fellow member of the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, who was 63 at the time. Born in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), as a child Richmond was taken on a Grand Tour of Europe, studying art and music. She was a scholarship holder at London’s Slade School, later travelling for two years around Europe with a childhood friend, artist Frances Hodgkins. A much-loved art educator, Richmond was admired for her poise, charm and intellect, qualities that Richardson eloquently captures in this faithful depiction.

Ritratto del Maestro (Portrait of Cav A Dattilo-Rubbo)

Frances Dolina Ellis was born in Papaioea (Palmerston North), Aotearoa New Zealand in 1900 and in her youth showed both musical and artistic talent. She travelled to London in 1923, studying at the Central School of Arts and Crafts under Bernard Meninsky, who instilled in her a lifelong interest in colour. After a brief sojourn in Australia, Ellis taught drawing at the technical and high schools in Papaioea, where she studied under Harry Linley Richardson.

In 1934, Ellis returned to Australia, enrolling in the classes of Italian émigré artist Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo (1870–1955), an early supporter of modernism in Sydney. Ellis held a two-woman show in 1938 with Dora Toovey, and by 1941 was appointed principal of Dattilo-Rubbo’s art school, where she remained until 1949.

Influenced by the post-impressionist teachings of Dattilo-Rubbo, Ellis greatly admired Paul Cézanne and her work reflects a cubist approach in its use of faceting and colour divisions. This portrait of the ‘maestro’ received his highest praise; Dattilo-Rubbo wrote:

… you have achieved the best by a good composition, supported by strong drawing, virile colour and excellent touch. It is a well-balanced work, and I heartily congratulate you with my good wishes to see the painting hanged in a worthy art gallery – if possible, in your native land.

Exhibited as Jean Nethercote

Ola Cohn

Carola ‘Ola’ Cohn (1892–1964) was born in Bendigo, Victoria and studied sculpture at Swinburne in Melbourne before taking up a scholarship at the Royal College in London under renowned British sculptor Henry Moore. Cohn was a pioneer in Australia, fashioning colossal modernist sculptures, hand-carved in stone. Described by writer and friend Barbara Blackman (the subject of the 1997 winning portrait by Nigel Thomson) as ‘a big flour bag of a woman, healthy as bread, strong as a millstone’, Cohn had a studio-home that was a meeting place for Melbourne’s artistic community. It was here that Jean Goldberg and Cohn met in 1956, becoming close friends.

Goldberg studied nursing at Royal Melbourne Hospital, graduating in 1948. In the 1950s, she became a passionate advocate for human rights and protested social injustice. Taking life classes with Cohn in the mid 1950s, Goldberg then studied at George Bell’s studio from 1956 to 1959. She later learned needlepoint lacemaking while working as a librarian at the Embroiderers’ Guild, Victoria. Goldberg went on to create idiosyncratic and witty lace pieces from everyday subjects, including newspaper advertisements for cars.

In her only Archibald Prize work, Goldberg fills the canvas with Cohn’s forceful presence, the stocky figure and tousled grey hair built up with thick daubs of paint. Cohn’s vocation is distinguished by two sculptures, shown in the background.

Paul Beadle

The subject of this portrait, British-born sculptor Paul Beadle (1917–92), settled in Australia in 1946, following his discharge from the Royal Navy at the end of World War II. Having studied sculpture at London’s Central School of Arts and Crafts, in 1947 Beadle became an instructor at the East Sydney Technical College (ESTC) Strathfield campus. An influential educator, he also taught at Newcastle Art School and his public art can be seen across Newcastle. In 1961, Beadle settled in Aotearoa New Zealand, where he became known for his figurative, lost-wax cast sculptures.

Novocastrian Jon Molvig was a soldier in New Guinea and the Philippines during World War II and was a student under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme at ESTC, where he met Beadle. After graduation, Molvig left Sydney in 1951 for Europe, where he studied the work of the modern masters such as Pierre Bonnard and Edvard Munch. His highly individual works encompass the genres of portraiture, landscape and, in his final years, abstraction.

Molvig painted Beadle the year after the sculptor completed his most celebrated commission – the 11-metre-high eagle and sphere surmounting the Australian–American Memorial in Canberra. It was the first of 11 Archibald portraits by Molvig (he won in 1966 with his portrayal of artist Charles Blackman) and was painted the year Molvig left Sydney for Brisbane, where he remained until his death, aged just 46.

Portrait of Dick Roughsey, OBE

Following a brief period studying art at Swinburne Technical College, Melbourne-born Ray Crooke enlisted in the army in 1940, which took him to Cape York and Waiben (Thursday Island) and instilled in him a fascination for the peoples and landscape of Far North Queensland. After the war he completed his studies but soon returned to Waiben where he began painting scenes of island life, for which he is best known.

In 1969, Crooke – together with pilot and explorer Percy Trezise and Kunhanaamendaa artist Goobalathaldin (Dick Roughsey) – began a search for the historical goldrush site Hells Gate, in the Kennedy Creek region of Cape York Peninsula. That same year Crooke won the Archibald Prize with a portrait of his close friend, novelist George Johnston.

Born on Langunarnji Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria around 1920, Goobalathaldin was encouraged throughout his career by Trezise – with whom he collaborated – and Crooke, successfully exhibiting bark paintings and oils, and creating illustrated children’s books. In 1971 his book Moon and rainbow was the first published autobiography by an Aboriginal Australian and, in 1973, he became the first chair of the Aboriginal Arts Board. In his 1982 Archibald work, Crooke depicts the artist in his studio, surrounded by his works celebrating Kunhanaamendaa culture and traditions. Goobalathaldin died in 1985.

I wanted to paint him as a mountain

With a Master of Fine Arts from the University of New South Wales and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Curtin University, Perth-born artist Abdul Abdullah works across a variety of media, including painting, photography, video, installation and performance. Abdullah’s projects often address his concerns for marginalised minority groups, drawing on his own experiences as a young Muslim growing up in Australia in a post-9/11 world. In 2011 he won the Blake Prize for Human Justice.

Abdullah’s subject for his 2014 Archibald portrait is high-profile Aboriginal artist and political activist Richard Bell, who has appeared as a sitter eight times, including with self-portraits in 2004 and 2015. Born in Charleville, Queensland in 1953, the self-taught Bell has been exhibiting art for more than 25 years nationally and internationally, addressing issues of Aboriginal social justice, land rights and sovereignty.

Abdullah saw Bell, his friend and mentor, as ‘mountainous … the type of person who fills a room when he enters it’. His visualisation of Bell as an astronaut, critically gazing back upon ‘a planet gone mad’, references the 1968 sci-fi classic Planet of the apes, with the fictitious ANSA space agency logo on Bell’s suit. Abdullah often interlaces icons of popular culture into his work, cyphers to be decoded by his audience through a measured process of revelation.

Jarinyanu David Downs

A veteran of the Archibald Prize, Robert Hannaford has been represented 26 times over the past 30 years, once stating, ‘I keep entering, as I’ve always done, to show my work to the widest possible audience’. Winner of the People’s Choice on three occasions, his subjects include former prime ministers Paul Keating (1998) and Malcolm Fraser (2010), as well as eight self-portraits. His courageous 2007 self-portrait was painted while recovering from life-threatening tongue cancer.

Largely self-taught, Hannaford took up painting full-time in 1970, encouraged by artists Hans Heysen and Ivor Hele, the latter a five-time Archibald winner. Rejecting contemporary trends in abstraction, Hannaford embraced realism, stating, ‘I do try to capture the real, the accurate, colours, tones, shapes and movements in my visual field. In fact, this is what excites me more than anything’.

Hannaford’s 1995 Archibald portrait depicts Wangkajunga and Walmajarri painter, printmaker and preacher Jarinyanu David Downs, shortly before his death in 1995. Born in the Great Sandy Desert around 1925, Downs was considered one of the leading lights of the contemporary Aboriginal art movement. Downs’ works express his strongly held Christian beliefs coupled with representations of Walmajarri story cycles and specific cultural sites.

The Huxleys

Melbourne-based painter Sally Ross is known for her distinctive landscapes and portraits, their surfaces filled with intricate detail and mark-making. Completing graduate and post-graduate degrees in Melbourne in the late 1980s, she then spent eight years in France, studying, working and painting.

A traditional easel painter, Ross finds inspiration in vintage photography and images in old journals, books and postcards. Historical portraiture also informs her work, and her double portrait of gender-bending performance artists Garrett and Will Huxley is suggestive of the marriage portraits of Jan van Eyck and Piero della Francesca, and the fresco found in Pompeii of Terentius Neo and his wife. Elemental forms and the subtle dichotomy between abstraction and representation within her compositions reflect Ross’s persistent dialogue with art across the ages.

Ross wrote:

I saw the mysterious potential for art/civilisation to be expressed within the handsome duo’s magical physical presence. This portrait is a homage to the pure folie of the Huxleys’ performances, as well as hairstyles found in the portraits of Otto Dix and Diego Velázquez. I wanted a deliberately distant, expressionless pose that transforms their glittery bodysuits and cheap, teased wigs into a portrait evoking the timeless silhouettes of antiquity and ‘old paintings’ I so admire.

Ross is a finalist in the 2021 Archibald Prize with a self-portrait.

Peter Upward and friends

A graduate of Sydney’s National Art School (NAS), Edward ‘Ted’ Binder held a lifelong commitment to social justice and reformist politics. Awarded the English-Speaking Union Travelling Scholarship in 1966, Binder followed the ‘hippy trail’ through Kashmir to London, where Australian artists Peter Upward (1932–83) and David Boyd (1924–2011) had settled. He held his first solo show in 1968 at the Clytie Jessop Gallery, London.

Back in Sydney in 1969, Binder began teaching at NAS, eventually joined by Upward, a key figure of Australian gestural abstraction, and Roderick Shaw (1915–92), one of the founders of the Studio of Realist Art. Binder instilled in his students the essential role that drawing plays in the visual arts, and his large-scale highly finished works of the 1970s share an affinity with the detailed, photorealist works of Josonia Palaitis (who also has a work in Archie 100).

On the morning in November 1975, after the Labor government of Gough Whitlam was controversially dismissed, Binder, Upward and Shaw formed the Artists Action Group, staging exhibitions to raise money for progressive causes. In this group portrait, Binder presents his comrades in art – Boyd, Upward and Shaw – deep in conversation, at ease in each other’s presence, with Boyd’s sfumato drawing and ceramic goblets completing the scene. Binder shrewdly aligned modern-day subjects with classical techniques, offering portraiture a new relevance in 1970s Australian art.

Flugelman with Wingman

Born in the inaugural year of the Archibald Prize, Guy Warren left school in Goulburn aged 14 and started work as an assistant proofreader on The Bulletin in Sydney. He trained briefly under JS Watkins in his Sydney studio. Warren began drawing seriously during service in Bougainville in World War II and subsequently studied at Sydney Technical College (now the National Art School) under the Commonwealth Rehabilitation Training Scheme. Further study in London followed.

In 1985, Viennese-born sculptor Bert Flugelman (1923–2013) – Warren’s friend, neighbour and colleague at the University of Sydney’s Tin Sheds Art Workshop – challenged him to enter the Archibald, with each artist painting a portrait of the other. Flugelman’s portrait wasn’t accepted that year, but he did have six works in the Archibald between 1950 and 1965. Flugelman is celebrated for his monumental stainless-steel public sculptures, including Sydney’s Pyramid tower and the 20-metre-long Cones in Canberra.

Flugelman with Wingman was then-64-year-old Warren’s first Archibald entry, and the win allowed him to paint full time. The motif of a ‘wingman’ was inspired by hang-gliders he observed in the country, and the myth of Icarus who flew too close to the sun, melting his feather-and-wax wings. Warren explained, ‘It’s about taking risks, taking chances, and escaping’.

In the competition’s centenary year, a portrait of 100-year-old Warren by Peter Wegner was awarded the 2021 Archibald Prize.

Jean Appleton

Encouraged by her family, Brisbane-born Elisabeth Cummings enrolled at East Sydney Technical College in 1952 on the advice of artist Margaret Cilento. There she was introduced to the work of French Nabis artists Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard by her teacher Wallace Thornton (himself a ten-time Archibald exhibitor), with their focus on light and striking use of colour. Winning the 1958 NSW Travelling Art Scholarship, she based herself in Florence until 1964, attending the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, and studying briefly under Austrian expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka.

Returning permanently to Sydney in 1968, she eventually joined a growing community of artists at Wedderburn. Over the following five decades, Cummings’ intuitive works have traversed the genres of still life, landscape and portraiture. The pulsating movement of light and mood permeate the surfaces of her canvases, with intersecting planes of loosely brushed areas of colour.

Painted when she was 63 and her sitter 80, here Cummings portrays her friend, artist Jean Appleton (1911–2003), winner of the inaugural Portia Geach Memorial Award in 1965. Concerned purely with the space and colour of the living room where Appleton is seated, Cummings stated: ‘This is my interpretation, my feeling about Jean Appleton … this room is very much Jean, her presence is everywhere.’