Archie 100

The inaugural Archibald Prize was held just three years after the end of World War I. In its first decade, portraits of heroes of the Great War were lauded, many painted under the auspices of the Australian War Memorial’s Official War Art Scheme, initiated in 1917. Peace, however, was short-lived. In 1939, after England declared war on Germany, Australian and New Zealand servicemen and women went once more to the battlefields, as did artists. World War II again saw commissioning schemes, with women appointed as official war artists for the first time.

As the war raged on, images related to the conflict appeared increasingly in the Archibald, not just portraits of Australians in various service roles but also stories from the homefront. And the 1943 Archibald itself briefly knocked the war off newspaper front pages, when William Dobell won with his portrait of Joshua Smith.

The aftermath of the war saw émigré artists from across Europe come to these shores, bringing with them current ideas about portraiture. The work of these artists has become intrinsic to the chronicle of Australian art and the Archibald Prize.

Captain PG Taylor

Captain Patrick Gordon (Bill) Taylor (1896–1966) was a highly decorated aviator. During World War I, he served in the Royal Flying Corps, flying sorties against the infamous Red Baron, and was awarded the Military Cross for bravery. In the 1930s, he flew with Charles Kingsford Smith on his record-breaking flights, and was a ferry pilot for military aircraft across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans during World War II. In 1951, he flew his Catalina flying boat, Frigate Bird II – now in the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney – on a pioneering route across the Pacific, from Sydney to Valparaíso in Chile. Taylor was knighted in 1954 for services to aviation.

Norman St Clair Carter was a renowned stained-glass artist and prolific portrait painter in the first half of the 20th century. Surprisingly, unlike others of his generation, Carter never travelled abroad. He trained under Frederick McCubbin, and later studied with E Phillips Fox. His portraits show a formal and precise quality, with his aim being to elucidate his subject’s character. Despite 58 portraits in the Archibald over 32 years, Carter never took out the prize.

Carter portrays the aviator in his RFC leather flying coat, a striking figure set against calm blue skies, his Lockheed Altair on the dunes.

Portrait of Vera Scantlebury Brown, OBE, MB, ChB (Melbourne)

This striking yet gentle portrait by Winifred McCubbin depicts Dr Vera Scantlebury Brown (1889–1946), who served as an assistant surgeon and officer of the Royal Army Medical Corps at London’s Endell Street Military Hospital during World War I. It was the only military hospital run by women within the British Army. Dr Vera, as she was known, was appointed director of the new Department of Infant Welfare in 1926, the first woman to head a government department in Victoria. She made far-reaching contributions in expanding and improving universal and free paediatric healthcare services across the state, the impacts of which can still be seen in healthcare centres today. Dr Vera received an OBE in 1938 in recognition of her distinguished work in preventative medicine.

Ruby Winifred Francis studied at Melbourne’s National Gallery School, before marrying Hugh McCubbin, the son of artist Frederick McCubbin, in 1924. Affectionately known as Ruby Win, she resumed painting and exhibiting in the 1930s after a decade caring for her young family. Winifred McCubbin was an accomplished portraitist, and member – later president – of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors. She exhibited until the 1950s with artists such as Violet McInnes, Ethel Carrick, Sybil Craig and Ola Cohn.

Matron Muriel Doherty, RAAFNS

Raised in Newcastle, New South Wales, Alfreda Goninan studied under artist Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo in Sydney and was a student in Paris in the 1920s. She married Radoje Marcovitch, a prominent Yugoslav diplomat and journalist, and lived in Yugoslavia for 20 years. Alfreda Marcovitch escaped Europe with her two children just prior to the 1941 bombing of Belgrade by the Nazis; her husband is presumed to have died during the blitz.

Marcovitch and Muriel Knox Doherty (1896–1988), the subject of this portrait, knew one another from Sydney’s Abbotsleigh girls’ school, where Doherty was an untrained teacher, and Alfreda her student. Doherty joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration following the cessation of hostilities in 1945, when she was appointed matron to the recently liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. She was awarded the Royal Red Cross for exceptional services in military nursing and her harrowing experiences were later published in Letters from Belsen 1945.

Doherty, then 52 years, sat for this portrait every afternoon for a week, dressed in the Royal Australian Air Force Nursing Service uniform she had worn during the war. Marcovitch often included intriguing backgrounds in her portraits; in this instance, the spacious and light-filled hallway of artist Desiderius Orban’s Sydney studio, with its dramatically receding archways.

Matron MacIntosh, Lidcombe Hospital

Lucy Wise MacIntosh (1884–1974), the subject of this portrait, was a highly respected and dedicated nurse with over 40 years of service when she retired in 1948. She received the Royal Red Cross Decoration in 1918 for her work at London’s Harefield Hospital during World War I, as well as the Red Cross Florence Nightingale Medal in 1965, for her exceptional devotion in the humanitarian sphere.

Brought up in what was then semi-rural Liverpool, outside Sydney, Eric Wilson trained at the Julian Ashton Art School before winning the 1937 NSW Travelling Art Scholarship. In London, he studied at the Royal Academy and Westminster School, then travelled to Europe and attended artist Amédée Ozenfant’s school in Paris, absorbing the tenets of French cubism. Wilson returned to Sydney in 1939, following the outbreak of World War II. As a conscientious objector, he became a ward attendant at Lidcombe State Hospital, where he made emotionally expressive studies of the residents in the geriatric wards. While posted there, he met MacIntosh, who was matron of the hospital for 27 years.

Wilson has depicted the steadfast and commanding figure of the nurse standing by a hospital bed, austerely dressed in her scarlet shoulder cape and white linen veil.

Patient awaiting plastic surgery (Private Mark O’Bryan)

An official war artist for the Australian War Memorial from 1943 to 1945, Harold Abbott joined the 2/9 Australian Field Regiment and served in the Pacific Islands and Singapore, recording Australia’s armed services in World War II. As a student at the Sydney Art School under Julian Ashton, he was an exemplary draughtsman, his skills further honed by studies at the Royal Academy in London in the 1930s. Abbott was a keen observer of the many aspects that made up a soldier’s everyday life, building a strong rapport with his subjects and learning about their experiences.

This portrait is one of the first Abbott produced as a war artist and demonstrates the trust he established with his subjects. Born in Victoria, Private Mark James O’Bryan (1917–2008) was a driver with the 2/2 Australian Infantry Battalion, 6th Australian Divisional Army Service Corps. He was recognised for exceptional services in the field in New Guinea, after he was shot in the face and left shoulder during a battle.

In October 1943, O’Bryan was transferred to the 115th (Heidelberg) Military Hospital in Victoria, where Abbott documented his horrific injuries. The soldier calmly meets the viewer’s gaze, with Abbott honestly depicting his vulnerability while honouring his bravery. O’Bryan eventually received plastic surgery, which only left a slight scar.

Robert H Black, MD

Nora Heysen was the first woman awarded the Archibald Prize, winning in 1938 with her portrait of Adine Michèle Elink Schuurman (nee Lambert), the French wife of the Dutch consul-general in Australia. Her success was overshadowed by the public focus on her being the daughter of celebrated painter Hans Heysen. It also drew the ire of Max Meldrum (the 1939 and 1940 Archibald winner), who told a journalist that the life of an artist was ‘unnatural and impossible for a woman’.

In 1943, Heysen broke more ground when she became the first woman in Australia to be appointed an official war artist. Serving mostly in New Guinea, she produced a large body of work, with the Australian War Memorial acquiring 152 of these under the Official War Art Scheme. New Guinea is also where Heysen met Dr Robert Black (1917–88), an eminent bacteriologist and professor of tropical medicine at the University of Sydney from 1963 to 1982.

When this portrait was painted, Heysen was settling into life in Sydney with Black. He appears relaxed and in quiet contemplation, one hand resting across his blue pants; Heysen once claimed she never painted a picture ‘without something blue in it’. It is an intimate portrait, with the pictorial plane animated with loose, broken brushstrokes. A sense of immediacy and liveliness reflects Heysen’s concern with the arrangement of and interaction between colour, light and form.

Despatch rider (Sergeant Rex Beggs)

Douglas Watson was one of the youngest official war artists during World War II. He enlisted at the age of 22, having only recently graduated from East Sydney Technical College (now the National Art School). With the rank of lieutenant, Watson covered military activities in Australia, New Guinea and Borneo. When he submitted this portrait, he had already won the Wynne Prize for landscape painting, in 1942.

In his 1943 Archibald portrait, Watson draws attention to a lesser-known role of wartime servicemen. Military couriers were used to deliver urgent messages between headquarters and combat units – a vital and often perilous responsibility. Watson depicts rider Sergeant Rex Joseph Allan Beggs (1921–91), from Warrnambool, Victoria, a signalman with the 14 Australian Lines Section in Australia, Papua New Guinea and on the island of Biak, Indonesia. He is kitted out in his uniform: motorcycle helmet and goggles, leather gauntlets – one of which is tightly clutching and protecting his valuable cargo – and greatcoat with white and blue armbands. These armbands made despatchers easily distinguishable as part of the Signals unit. White symbolises the ribbons wound around the staff carried by the Greek god Hermes, the winged herald and messenger of the gods and protector of travellers, while blue represents the British royal colours.

Stanislaus Rapotec

In this Archibald-winning work, Judy Cassab has portrayed her friend and fellow émigré Stanislaus Rapotec (1913–97), a self-taught artist, whose raw, expressive abstractions burst onto Sydney’s art scene in the 1950s. It was only the second time since 1921 that a woman had won the Archibald, with both artist and sitter attracting the attention of the Australian public and media. Cassab was already a successful and sought-after portraitist, having won the inaugural Australian Women’s Weekly Portrait Prize in 1955. She was known for her ability to quickly capture her sitter’s likeness in her distinctive style. Rapotec rose to greater prominence when he won the 1961 Blake Prize for religious painting, with the first abstract work awarded the prize.

Cassab (the child of Hungarian parents) and Rapotec (who was born in Trieste when it was part of Austro-Hungarian empire) connected through their shared experiences as ‘New Australians’. During World War II, Rapotec had joined the Yugoslav Resistance, taking part in several courageous missions for the Allied Intelligence Forces. Cassab knew from a young age she would be an artist; however, her studies were interrupted by the Nazi occupation of Vienna. Arriving in Australia, Cassab found the acceptance of women as professional artists a difficult path to navigate. Nonetheless, she went on to win the Archibald Prize again in 1967, one of only two women to twice win the award (the other is Del Kathryn Barton, in 2008 and 2013).

Self-portrait

Before he arrived in Australia, Maximilian Feuerring was an established artist in Poland. He had studied at the Royal Academy in Rome and later in Paris, exhibited successfully and taught at the Jewish Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Feuerring was a soldier in World War I and in the war between Russia and Poland, and when World War II began he immediately joined the army. He was interned in several prisoner-of-war camps, including Murnau in Germany, where, upon his release, he met Gabriele Münter of the Blue Rider Group.

After the war, Feuerring found himself without home or family (most of them had died in concentration camps) and in 1950 he migrated to Australia, aged 54. The response to his work in his new country was negative or indifferent, which frustrated Feuerring, but he was sustained by his friendships with other émigré artists – including Judy Cassab and Louis Kahan (both eventually Archibald Prize winners). Feuerring also supported himself as a stage designer, restorer and teacher.

This self-portrait – suggestive of French painter Pierre Bonnard, whose work Feuerring admired – was his first Archibald entry. All 11 of Feuerring’s Archibald works were self-portraits and demonstrate his highly individual and experimental approach to both style and technique.

Self-portrait

Michael Kmit was one of many artists who emigrated to Australia, displaced from their homelands during World War II. As part of the Australian Government’s immigration scheme, he was contracted to work in a series of temporary jobs, including in a cement factory and as a railway porter and cleaner. In his artistic life, however, he found support and encouragement from influential Australian artists and critics such as James Gleeson, Paul Haefliger and Judy Cassab. He was prolific during the 1950s and 1960s, winning numerous awards including the 1953 Blake Prize for religious art and the 1957 and 1970 Sulman Prize for genre painting.

A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, Poland, Kmit was influenced by Byzantine icon painting, mosaic and folk art from his homeland in Ukraine, and the works of Marc Chagall and Henri Matisse. His distinctive portraits, with their emotive use of rich and luminous colour, patterning and geometric forms, were well received in Australia. Kmit’s unique approach influenced many artists, particularly those in the artists’ colony at the Merioola mansion in Sydney, where he lived in 1950.

This was Kmit’s first work selected for the Archibald; other Archibald portraits include two of artist Wallace Thornton (1955, 1969) and a portrayal of Dennis Colsey (1971), the first education officer appointed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1967.