Archie 100

Over the past century, artists have sought out inspiring subjects for Archibald portraits. Some of these sitters were not widely known outside their communities until they featured in the exhibition, while others were already admired nationally and internationally. Often, they were trailblazers in their chosen fields, whether in art, literature, law, filmmaking, sport or other endeavours.

Sadly, many of these once-honoured individuals have now been largely forgotten. The portraits presented here commemorate some of those who have united people through their ideals and deeds. As we look back, we once again celebrate the local heroes and national icons who have helped create the culturally diverse society we value today.

Portrait of Dame Mary Gilmore

Renowned writer and feminist Mary Gilmore (1865–1962) – a contemporary of bush poet Henry Lawson – was a passionate campaigner for a wide range of social reforms, including women’s suffrage and emancipation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and Australia’s poor. A celebrated public figure and doyenne of Sydney’s literary world, she is featured on Australia’s $10 banknote. Portraits of Gilmore were included in the Archibald 11 times by eight artists.

Adelaide Perry’s artistic career began in Melbourne at the National Gallery School. Awarded a travelling art scholarship in 1920, she attended London’s Royal Academy under Walter Sickert, later working in Paris. In Sydney, she established herself as an artist and role model for generations of artists, both through the Adelaide Perry School of Art and her 30-year-tenure as art mistress at Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Croydon. In 2001, the Adelaide Perry Gallery was established at PLC Sydney (as the girls school is now known) and every year hosts the Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing.

In the interwar period, Perry exhibited with Contemporary Group artists, including Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith, whose work represents the first significant wave of modernist culture in Australia. She was also a member of the more established Society of Artists and later the Australian Academy of Art, thereby traversing Sydney’s contemporary and conservative artistic milieu. Perry’s portraits are characterised by her commitment to realist techniques, with impeccable draughtsmanship, tonal modelling and an emphasis on form, using crisp outlines.

Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal)

Poet, environmentalist and activist Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker, 1920–93) was born on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island). Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Aunty Oodgeroo campaigned for equal citizenship rights for Aboriginal people. She became the first published Aboriginal poet with her 1964 book We are going, dubbed a ‘battle cry’ against social injustice. In 1971, Aunty Oodgeroo returned to Minjerribah where she started a learning centre named Moongalba.

Clif Peir’s work is unfamiliar to most, despite the gallery of notable subjects he painted for the Archibald. While working as a Sydney County Council designer, Peir studied part time at the Julian Ashton Art School with Archibald artists Joshua Smith and Eric Wilson, and exhibited extensively. His interest in drama led him to stage design, with his portraits possessing a theatrical quality. From 1950, Peir travelled extensively in Central Australia, the Northern Territory and Flinders Ranges in South Australia. He painted Aboriginal peoples and desert landscapes, and his work featured in the 1982 exhibition Art sale for land rights.

This portrait was painted at the artist’s family home in Oatley, where Aunty Oodgeroo stayed on her visits to Sydney. Peir’s realism verges on surrealism; the poet’s elongated figure against a vast, green-tinged vista is reminiscent of the dreamlike figure-landscapes of Russell Drysdale.

Exhibited as Jenny Sands

Professor Alice Tay

Alice Erh-Soon Tay (1934–2004) was born in Singapore, where she became a barrister. Emigrating to Australia in 1961, Tay was appointed the Challis Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Sydney in 1975, and in 1986 was made a Member of the Order of Australia for her ‘contribution to teaching and research in law’. Committed to the promotion of human rights, she was president of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. She encouraged the contribution of women from diverse backgrounds to public life.

A student at the Julian Ashton Art School in the 1970s, Jenny Giacco (nee Pollack) also trained under realist painter Brian Dunlop, whose work she greatly admired. Dunlop encouraged her to travel to Europe, where she studied masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance and learned the painstaking technique of egg-oil emulsion. She won the 1989 Portia Geach Memorial Award with a portrait of printmaker Alex Karpin, whom she had also painted for the Archibald (1989, 1990), exhibiting under the pseudonym Jenny Sands. Her husband, Francis Giacco, won the 1994 Archibald with his Homage to John Reichard.

Commissioned by the University of Sydney, Jenny Giacco’s portrait of Tay was completed over several months at the artist’s studio, Tay always arriving meticulously attired and hair perfectly coifed. Giacco’s precisely rendered composition is a measured arrangement of objet d’art and exquisite textiles, with a subtle dignity befitting her subject.

‘A true Territorian’: Portrait of Grandma Lum Loy

Lim Lee See (c1884–1980), known as Granny Lum Loy – the matriarch of Darwin’s Chinese community – was a pioneering market gardener. It is not known when she was born (probably between 1884 and 1891) but she emigrated to Australia from Guangdong, China as a child. In this portrait, her weathered skin and arresting presence embody her abiding resilience; she survived two world wars, the deaths of her husband and only daughter, and the destruction of her gardens by Cyclone Tracy in 1974.

Geoff La Gerche was dubbed an ‘eyeball realist’ for his super-scaled portraits, which were a commanding feature of the Archibald Prize in the late 1970s. Following formal studies in Melbourne, La Gerche departed for London in 1967. At the Royal College of Art, his teacher, American pop artist Jim Dine, had a profound effect on his work. Returning to Australia, La Gerche utilised air-brushed acrylics to achieve precise renderings of light and shade in his early hyper-real works. In 1979, La Gerche took up an artist residency in Darwin. There, he produced a series of vast landscapes painted with finely textured brushwork in oil – and this striking portrait of a beloved Northern Territory identity.

This was one of La Gerche’s two works in the 1979 Archibald – the second a portrait of Yolŋu elder Wesley Lanhupuy. He was also a finalist in the 1979 Wynne Prize for landscape painting and Sulman Prize for genre painting.

My Brother Mac Silva

With this portrait of fellow Dunghutti/Ngaku man Malcolm ‘Mac’ Silva (1947–89) – lead singer of the bands Silva Linings and Black Lace – Robert Campbell Junior became the first Aboriginal artist known to have exhibited in the Archibald. Campbell and Silva were both born in Kempsey, NSW, growing up on Burnt Bridge Mission, where speaking Aboriginal languages was forbidden, and children were still forcibly removed from their families.

Taught by his father, Campbell made souvenirs from found materials, incorporating his knowledge of the plants, animals and environment on Dunghutti/Ngaku Country. He eventually turned to canvas and painted narrative works, recording stories remembered from his childhood. Campbell’s cartoon-style approach, using bold colours, often belies his weighty subjects: racial discrimination and the historical trauma of colonialism.

Both Campbell and Silva were living in Sydney in the 1980s. Campbell was undertaking a printmaking residency at the University of Sydney’s Tin Sheds Gallery, and Silva’s rendition of ‘Malabar mansion’ – written by an inmate while in Long Bay jail – was the most requested song on Radio Redfern. Campbell portrays the 42-year-old Silva at his drums, mid song, titles from rock’n’roll and country hits drifting behind him. Tragically, Silva passed away before the portrait’s selection in the Archibald; Campbell died just three years later.

Read more: Mac Silva: the music behind the man

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

Tippo Powder, Queensland Police tracker

There are only ten known portraits of Aboriginal Australians in the first three decades of the Archibald Prize; William Bustard’s portrait of Jetimarala man Timothy ‘Tippo’ Powder (1914–72) is one of them.

Powder was born at Yatton Station, Queensland and forcibly relocated to Woorabinda Mission as a child. In the 1940s his skills as a buckjumper at country shows and boxer in Rockhampton boxing stadium were celebrated, and he was known for being an excellent accordion player. He was also a successful tracker, whose expertise in solving missing person cases led to two transfers to Victoria Police in the 1930s and late 1950s. A highly developed knowledge and skill refined by Aboriginal people, the ability to track or ‘read’ the landscape led to the establishment of Victoria Police’s own corps of Queensland Aboriginal trackers in the 1880s.

Bustard was an exceptional draughtsman, who studied at London’s Slade School. His urban and rural landscape painting brought him wide recognition and influence. In 1921 he emigrated to Australia and quickly established himself as a stained-glass designer, having restored European medieval church windows damaged during the war.

This captivating portrait, with its radiant palette and free brushwork, presents 29-year-old Powder at the height of his fame in the boxing ring and as a Rockhampton Police tracker.

Portrait of Albert Namatjira

This bravura portrait of Western Arrernte artist Albert Namatjira (1902–59) by William Dargie is probably the most recognisable and universally respected of all Archibald winners. By the 1950s, reproductions of Namatjira’s watercolours of his Country adorned the walls of Australian middle-class homes.

Born at Ntaria (Hermannsburg) on Western Arrernte Country – and briefly tutored by artist Rex Battarbee – Namatjira laid the foundations for the Hermannsburg painting movement. Dargie admired his defiance of bureaucracy and exploitation, and Aboriginal artists today – including his great-grandson Vincent Namatjira – are stirred by his legacy. In 1957, Namatjira was the first Aboriginal person granted Australian citizenship. Despite his artistic success, Namatjira died broken-spirited, aged 57 years, his anguish and resilience perceptible in this portrait.

Dargie trained under Archibald Colquhoun – who had 36 portraits in the Archibald Prize between 1926 and 1960 – and Mervyn Napier Waller at Melbourne Technical College. However, he was most inspired by the work of John Longstaff. Dargie was rewarded by Archibald judges eight times between 1941 and 1956 – a record unmatched in the prize’s history. His 1952 success led to protests by art students, who brought a dachshund to the Gallery wearing the placard: ‘Winner Archibald Prize – William Doggie’. Dargie’s staunchly realist portraits often lacked the freshness and vitality seen in this portrait, which was painted in Sydney during a visit by Namatjira to the city.

Jockey Norman Stephens

For over 30 years, Sam Fullbrook was a regular in the Archibald Prize, and won the Wynne Prize for landscape painting in 1963 and 1964. Following military service in Palestine and New Guinea during World War II, Fullbrook trained alongside Fred Williams and John Brack at Melbourne’s National Gallery School under William Dargie. He then spent the 1950s and 1960s travelling and painting across Australia, working as a miner, cane cutter and stockman. Keenly interested in horses, Fullbrook was living in Brisbane in the 1970s when he became a racehorse owner and met veteran jockey Norman Stephens (1931–2019).

Stephens, then 43 years old, had a successful career riding before turning his hand to training. His bantam weight and legendary status earned him the nickname ‘Whopper’. Of his selection, Fullbrook said: ‘Why on earth shouldn’t we have footballers and tram conductors, and so on, as worthy subjects?’ It was a popular winner.

Fullbrook’s portrait is painted in his deceptively naïve style with strong blocks of colour and his spontaneous alla prima (‘wet on wet’) technique. Critic Nancy Borlase noted:

Fullbrook … vividly catches the character of this pert, flyweight figure with his scarlet cap and sash and lightly held whip … painted with a touch as light and as swift as a jockey in motion.

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

Paul Cox

Acclaimed for her abstract landscape works, Jenny Sages was a regular Archibald contributor for over 20 years, winning the 2012 People’s Choice award. Born in Shanghai to Russian Jewish parents, Sages studied commercial art in Sydney and New York before embarking on a career in fashion illustration. Becoming a full-time artist in her fifties, Sages met and painted Anmatyerre artist Emily Kngwarreye during one of Sages’ many expeditions to Central Australia; her landscape, The road to Utopia, won the 2005 Wynne Prize. Her Archibald sitters have included dancer Meryl Tankard (1999), author Helen Garner (2003) and Dutch-born filmmaker Paul Cox, shown in this portrait, whose body of idiosyncratic films Sages greatly admired.

Lauded as the father of Australian independent cinema, Cox wrote and directed the critically acclaimed documentary Vincent in 1987. Here, Sages casts the director in his home, pipe in hand. Behind him, an image of Van Gogh’s Self-portrait with bandaged ear and pipe 1889 offers insight into Cox’s state of mind. The 56-year-old filmmaker was about to leave for America, unable to source funding in Australia for his next project. Silhouetted against a bright sunlit window, the contours of Cox’s face and troubled countenance are sensitively conveyed. Painted over a four-month period, Sages recalled, ‘It was a terribly moving experience for me’.

Paul Cox died in 2016, aged 76.