This Tempe Manning self-portrait was acquired by the Art Gallery of NSW in 2021. It is one of 26 works the artist exhibited in the Archibald Prize between 1931 and 1955.
Manning (1897–1960) showed a talent and interest in art from a young age. She studied under Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo in Sydney, with a period in Paris just before World War I. In a departure from her French academic training, she began experimenting with pointillist colour theories and techniques. The work Manning produced at this time added to the first vital stage of modernist culture in Australia.
By the late 1920s, Manning returned to live in the family home in Bowral, New South Wales and concentrated on portrait commissions and teaching. Dattilo-Rubbo’s influence and the chromatic contrasts favoured by the early modernists, including contemporary Grace Cossington Smith, can be recognised in the rich palette of mauves and greens and loose, thick application of paint in this work. Manning renders an assured elegance and confidence in her pose and bold gaze, alluding both to George Lambert’s hand gestures and Henry Hanke’s stance in his 1934 winning portrait.
Manning believed in portraying a good ‘likeness’, writing in 1950: ‘By the word likeness I don’t mean to imply a purely superficial representation, but something that goes deeper and portrays the character of the sitter as shown in both face and hands. This is only something which concentrated study and careful handling can reveal.’