Archie 100

Customary codes of behaviour have, in more genteel times, dictated that certain topics should never enter ‘polite’ conversation. With the Archibald, however, nothing is off limits; artists tackle social taboos head-on without fear of censorship or reproach and seldom shy away from casting their loyalties and sentiments on their canvases. Universal suffrage, the rights of indigenous peoples and the environment are just some of the issues that artists have broached in the past century.

Spiritual figures, politicians of all persuasions, and those individuals whose beliefs and endeavours have impacted the way our society has grown and prospered are presented here. These Archibald sitters are among many to have spearheaded debates on the greatest challenges of our time.

Jessie Street

Jessie Lillingston (1889–1970) was born in India, arriving in Australia as a child. While studying arts at the University of Sydney, she met barrister Kenneth Street, who subsequently served as chief justice of New South Wales. In 1929 Jessie Street was already an activist for women as president of the Feminist Club. She became Australia’s leading feminist – a crusader for family planning, equal pay and employment for women – and deeply committed to social justice and peace. Street was the only female adviser in the Australian delegation to the founding conference of the United Nations in 1945 and established the UN Commission on the Status of Women and the Charter of Women’s Rights.

Following studies at London’s Royal Academy under John Singer Sargent and Sir William Orpen, Reginald Jerrold-Nathan was an established portrait painter when he arrived in Sydney in 1924. Having painted members of the royal families of England, Denmark and Iraq, he was well-received in Sydney society. One of the prize’s most prolific artists, Jerrold-Nathan portrayed many of Australia’s leading women, including authors Dorothea Mackellar (1930) and Ethel Turner (Mrs Curlewis, 1933) and feminist Linda Littlejohn (another of his four 1929 Archibald entries).

Jerrold-Nathan’s penchant for painting finery can be seen in Street’s stylish velvet brocade jacket and gleaming green-beaded necklace. His subject, however, preferred more practical attire: tailor-made suits and comfortable shoes.

Katharine Susannah Prichard

Katharine Susannah Prichard (1883–1969) was a pioneer writer who was devoted to the causes of international peace and socialism. She had an unsettled childhood, with her family enduring financial hardship, but matriculated from South Melbourne College. With the cost of university prohibitive and needing to earn a living, she became a governess and journalist. Prichard championed the underdog and the oppressed and, following the death of her brother during World War I, she campaigned against conscription and war. She became a foundation member of the Australian Communist Party and was later vilified by conservative politicians for her loyalty to the Russian people. From the 1940s, her popular novels followed the aesthetic conventions of socialist realism.

It is little wonder Prichard became one of Noel Counihan’s Archibald subjects. He had painted several prominent trade union leaders and those in academic and literary circles. As a young man during the Depression, Counihan joined the Communist Party. Rejecting the academic tonal approach of classes at Melbourne’s National Gallery School, he left, preferring to work alongside politically motivated artists, including Roy Dalgarno and Yosl Bergner. Throughout his life, his art reflected his concern with social injustice and the human condition.

Counihan painted this portrait of Prichard in three days, aiming to capture her humanity, dignity and resilience.

On display at the Art Gallery of NSW only. Not part of the Archie 100 tour.

The Honourable John Howard, MP

John Howard (born 1939) had been the federal member for Bennelong for five years – and treasurer of Australia for two – when this portrait was painted. It shows him in the Sydney backyard of his neighbour, artist Josonia Palaitis, in a manner that is surprisingly relaxed and starkly different to his usually formal and conservative image. A lawyer by profession, Howard became leader of the Liberal Party in 1995 and the 25th prime minister of Australia the following year, defeating Labor’s Paul Keating, whose portrait hangs nearby. Howard’s often contentious 12-year tenure is the second longest in history after Sir Robert Menzies, whose portrait by Ivor Hele won the 1954 Archibald.

A graduate of the National Art School and City Art Institute (now UNSW Art & Design), Palaitis is known for her photorealist approach to portraiture, working from informal photographs of her subjects. Creating drawings and watercolour studies, she shares these with her sitters before moving on to the final canvas. Her other Archibald subjects include jazz musician James Morrison (1993) and Justice Michael Kirby of the Australian High Court (2006).

Two decades after this portrait, Palaitis was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to paint then prime minister John Howard with his wife Janette, this time in the gardens of Kirribilli House in Sydney.

The Hon Edward Gough Whitlam AC QC

Painted in the lead-up to the 1972 Australian federal election, this was Clifton Pugh’s third win in the Archibald. He took the 1971 prize with a portrait of former prime minister Sir John McEwen and the 1965 prize with that of newspaperman RA Henderson. By the time of the 1972 Archibald announcement in January 1973, Labor leader Gough Whitlam (1916–2014) was Australia’s 21st prime minister. The win drew enormous crowds to the recently refurbished Art Gallery of New South Wales and the painting was Whitlam’s choice for his official portrait at Parliament House. Whitlam wrote to the artist: ‘My place in the history of art and yours in the history of politics are now secure’.

Whitlam – like his portrait – was either revered or derided, according to political predilection. He introduced many controversial policy measures and social reforms that radically changed Australia’s economic, legal and cultural landscape: establishing the Australia Council for the Arts, eliminating university fees, abolishing the death penalty, and ending military conscription. His troubled administration, however, was cut short when he was dismissed by the governor-general in 1975.

Trained at Melbourne’s National Gallery School, Pugh was best known for his bush landscapes, but became a sought-after portraitist. He made multiple versions of Whitlam’s portrait, trying to capture the dynamic Labor leader and cement his place in Archibald legend.

On display at the Art Gallery of NSW only. Not part of the Archie 100 tour.

The Prime Minister

In the 1960s, following a career in advertising, economics and film, Bryan Westwood began painting professionally, after encouragement from artists Jeffrey Smart and Justin O’Brien. Largely self-taught, he won the Archibald twice: in 1989 with a portrait of artist Elwyn Lynn, and with this painting of Paul Keating (born 1944). Keating had just seized the Labor Party leadership from Bob Hawke – the first time an incumbent prime minister was removed from office by his party. Keating himself lost power in a landslide 1996 federal election defeat, to Liberal leader John Howard (whose portrait is also in Archie 100).

Keating is known for his way with words. His best-known utterance may be his description of the country’s 1990 economic slump as ‘the recession we had to have’, although his ‘Redfern speech’, recognising the impact of colonial and government policies on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, was truly groundbreaking.

Westwood’s cool, painstaking portrayal of Keating, meticulously attired in one of his favoured Italian suits, was painted over five sittings in the artist’s precise realist style. Keating said of Westwood, whom he’d known since 1987:

A measure of his standing was that he was a painter in the classical tradition, but whose work was relevant in the ambience of contemporary Australian art. He made it easier for other artists to develop that vernacular.

Bob Brown

Geoff Dyer selected ‘wilderness warrior’ Bob Brown (born 1944) as the subject of his first Archibald work. A medical doctor, politician and conservationist, Brown helped establish the Wilderness Society and was instrumental in the 1982 campaign that prevented the damming of Tasmania’s Franklin River. When this portrait was painted, Brown had just resigned from state parliament and his leadership of the Tasmanian Greens. In 1996, he entered federal parliament as the first Australian Greens senator, becoming an outspoken leader of the national debate on climate change.

Like his subject, Dyer was a lifelong activist for the environment (he passed away in 2020). He is primarily known for his elegiac expressionist landscapes, depicting his beloved Tasmania. His training at Hobart’s Tasmanian School of Art under the influential Jack Carington Smith – who was the first Tasmanian artist to win the Archibald in 1963 – was strengthened through close study of the Romantic landscapes of English artists John Constable and JMW Turner.

In Dyer’s 1993 Archibald work, landscape and portrait coalesce as Brown gazes defiantly out from the canvas, arms crossed, sleeves rolled up, framed by the majestic scenery of the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park – now part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.

Dyer won the 2003 Archibald – the second artist from the ‘Apple Isle’ to claim the award – with his depiction of another Tasmanian, author Richard Flanagan.

Burnum Burnum

Born at Wallaga Lake in southern New South Wales, Woiworrung and Yorta Yorta activist, storyteller and author Burnum Burnum (1936–97) spent his childhood in mission homes as one of Australia’s Stolen Generation. He became a celebrated athlete, later studying law at the University of Tasmania, and joined the Bahá’í faith. In 1976 he changed his name from Harry Penrith to Burnum Burnum (great warrior), in honour of his great-grandfather, artist Tommy McRae, who created detailed pen and ink drawings of his life experiences in the late 1800s.

On 26 January 1988, in an act of defiance, Burnum Burnum planted the Aboriginal flag on the White Cliffs of Dover in England, symbolically invading Great Britain and declaring in irony, ‘We wish no harm to [England’s] natives’. He further pledged not to poison British waterholes, ‘pickle and preserve the heads […] of your people […] sterilise your women, nor to separate your children from their families’. At the time this portrait was painted, Burnum Burnum was advocating for changes to the Australian Constitution, to allow for seven additional Senate seats to represent Aboriginal people from each state and territory.

Burnum Burnum appears here in one of Kerry Lester’s distinctive stitched canvases. Her other Archibald subjects included designer Trent Nathan (1989), rocker Jimmy Barnes (1999) and ophthalmologist Fred Hollows (1993). A self-professed ‘Archibald bridesmaid’, Lester never won the prize; her self-portrait, however, was awarded the 1998 Packing Room Prize.

Portrait of Archbishop Mannix

This enigmatic portrait depicts Daniel Mannix (1864–1963), the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne from 1917 to 1963 and one of Australia’s most famous ecclesiastics, who controversially mixed the volatile ingredients of religion and politics.

A gifted orator, the Irish-born clergyman arrived in Melbourne in 1913 and became one of the most influential public figures in 20th-century Australia. Mannix was staunchly anti-conscription, pro-Irish-republicanism and supported trade unionism, bringing him into direct conflict with Australia’s Protestant majority. He was an Archibald subject on six occasions, including portrayals by John Longstaff (1935), Clifton Pugh (1962) and this work by little-known artist James Patrick ‘Max’ Martin, painted a decade before Mannix’s death, aged 99.

Martin studied briefly in Melbourne before travelling to England in 1913 where he achieved remarkable success at London’s Royal Academy and the Paris Salon in the 1920s, then disappeared from the spotlight, becoming a music hall entertainer and scenery painter. Martin returned to Australia in 1948.

It is little wonder that Martin, with his Galway heritage, chose to portray Mannix. In his distinctive highly ordered style, with cool clear tones and the figure carefully contained in outline, using the form of a Gothic window, Martin positions Mannix at the heart of his city and his community. Appositely, the reverse of this two-sided work depicts the flagellation of Christ at the hands of the Romans.

Rev TD Noffs

Theodore ‘Ted’ Noffs (1926–95) was a Methodist Church minister, whose nonconformist ministry and social activism were extolled in Australia and internationally. After receiving a licentiate of theology, he was posted to rural New South Wales, then Chicago in America, where he witnessed abject urban poverty. There he formed his belief that religion should be ‘open to the world, reaching the unloved and unlovely who are in the immediate community’. Returning to Sydney, he assisted in opening the first Lifeline Centre. In 1964, Noffs established the Wayside Chapel, welcoming people of all faiths and backgrounds.

As a child, Tiiu Reissar escaped the Soviet invasion of Estonia with her family, fleeing to Berlin and spending World War II in a refugee camp. Displaced from their homeland, Reissar’s family emigrated to New Zealand, and she completed studies in art and teaching. In 1960, Reissar arrived in Sydney and began teaching, and exhibiting her work. At one opening, she met Noffs, in whom she witnessed ‘a kind of inner light that glowed from his personality’, and decided to paint him.

For this portrait, she took a 2-inch spatula and applied thick strokes of oil. This technique was introduced to her by a fellow émigré artist, Latvian-born Reinis Zusters, who himself had 21 works in the Archibald. Reissar captured Noffs in his office, unwittingly placing his figure against a cross-like form. Noffs continued to agitate conservative church leaders until his death.

Rabbi Dr I Porush

Three-time Archibald winner William Pidgeon was an acclaimed illustrator and cartoonist before he decided to become a full-time painter. Recognised by his signature ‘Wep’, Pidgeon drew for newspapers and journals and was a war correspondent during World War II. His winning works include the now-missing portrait of journalist Ray Walker (1958), fellow artist and neighbour Lloyd Rees (1968), and this portrait of Australia’s foremost Jewish leader of the time.

Born in Jerusalem into a strict Orthodox Jewish family, Rabbi Dr Israel Porush (1907–91) was sent to Germany to study mathematics and Rabbinic Judaism. He received a doctorate in algebra and was ordained in 1934. Fearing the rise of Nazism, he migrated to London, then accepted the position of senior rabbi at Sydney’s Great Synagogue, which he took up in 1940. Porush was the ‘uncrowned chief rabbi of Australia’ and the head of the rabbinical court (Av Beth Din). Although some people did not agree with his strong Orthodox position, his was revered for combining ‘rabbinical learning, general scholarship and exceptional leadership’.

Pidgeon painted this portrait to celebrate Porush’s 21st anniversary as rabbi at the synagogue, the earliest surviving one in New South Wales that is still in use. Porush is dressed in his liturgical vestments, including his ṭallit (prayer shawl), standing at the bimah (reading platform) before the Ark.