Archibald Prize Portraits in Australia: 1921-1945.

 I have already referred to the prize-winning Port­rait of the Artist Joshua Smith by William Dobell in an old post and to the conservative responses to the other of Dobell’s winning portraits. So the time was right to review both JF Archibald and the first 24 years of the most important art prize in Australia.

John Feltham Archibald (1856-1919) was born near Geelong to a large, hardworking and not very wealthy Irish immigrant family. Archibald's secondary education was uneventful until he left school and was app­ren­ticed to Fairfax and Laurie, of the Warrnambool Examiner. At 19 he moved to Melbourne where he worked in the printing room of an evening tabloid, then he became a clerk with the Victorian Educ­at­ion Dept. Life in the big city suited this country boy very well.

Archibald left Victoria in 1878 and headed north. His greatest achievement occur­red when Archibald set up a partnership in Sydney with John Haynes, a newspaper colleague, and started The Bulletin in 1880. The Bulletin was Australia’s first quality weekly magazine of political, business and literary news; Haynes handled the advertis­ing and print production while Archibald concentrated on the liter­ary content. Australia’s most famous literary names, like Henry Lawson and Banjo Patterson, became regularly visitors in the Bull­etin office. Even more importantly for this post, Archibald employed many of Australia's leading young artists as illustrators for The Bulletin, including George Lambert, Norman Lindsay and BE Minns.

W B McInnes, winner in 1921

portrait of Desbrowe Annear, 

Art Gallery NSW

Peter Ross is very honest about the Bulletin. The bizarre mix of pol­itical activism and bitterly anti-Semitic, anti-Chinese xeno­ph­obia, so often found in this magazine, was popular in late 19th century Australia. In 2013 we would find those views, so openly expressed back then, to be repugnant.

I have no idea why Archibald was committed involuntarily to Callan Park Psychiatric Asylum in a Sydney in 1902, aged 46. It was not a happy time, especially since he was locked up over quite a few years, but Archibald made a good recovery and was allowed to live out his life in the community. Two things happened in these later years. Firstly Archibald sold his share of The Bulletin, which may have been a sad event. Secondly he was made a Trustee of the Art Gallery of NSW in 1915, which was definitely a wonderful event.

Archibald died in 1919, leaving a large estate. I want to mention just three clauses in the will. Part of the estate was used to establish a large fountain in Hyde Park, created by French sculptor François Sicard to remember Australians and French cooperation in WW1. Part of his estate funded the Australian Journalists' Associat­ion Benevolent Fund for the relief of distressed Australian journal­ists. And another of his estate endowed an annual art prize, to be judged by the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Thankfully the Archibald Bequest was replicated in Ross’ book. This prize each year for the best portrait painted by an Aus­tralian artist, preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in art, letters, science or politics. I have underlined the vague words that created the most uncertainty in the years after Archibald’s death.

So the Trustees had to be more specific than Archibald. Their Conditions of Entry are also specified in the book. They stipulated that:
1. the portrait must be painted from life;
2. the portrait may be of any size, including miniatures;
3. the painting must be painted during the twelve months before the competition, and the artist had to be resident in Australasia for 12 months before the competition; and
4. the Trustees need not award the prize if no picture, in the opinion of the Trustees, was seen as worthy. 

John Longstaff,  winner in 1928

portrait of Dr Alexander Leeper. 

Art Gallery NSW

Yet from the beginning the Archibald Prize aroused legal challenges, rivalries and animosities that had never been envisaged by the donor. His intentions, to perpetuate the memory of great Austral­ians, to improve the quality of portrait painting or to help artists, were never quite fulfilled.

The prize was first awarded was 1921, won by WB McInnes for his portrait of Desbrowe Annear, my favourite Melbourne architect. Then McInnes again won the prize in 1922 with a portrait of Prof Harrison Moore. And in 1923, with his Portrait of a Lady (his wife). Then in 1924 with a Portrait of Miss Collins. By then, the Sydney critics were annoyed. Not because the quality of the paintings was not up to their standards but because one man, a Melbournian at that, was hogging the award. He also won in 1926, 1930 and 1936.

The 1920s was a decade of great innov­ation in Europe with Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism and Bauhaus abstracts vying for attent­ion. But in Australia, the tradition of C19th acad­emic portraiture was thriving, as if preserved by its geographic isol­at­ion from the rest of the art world. Our portraits were "of merit, patriotic, of excellent craftsmanship and meticulously real". So we have to ask: did the Archibald Prize attract conservative artists who were not involved in the modernist movement? Or did more modernist artists adopt academic and tonal realism, specifically to win the prize?

 It is interesting to note that in the first 11 years of the Archibald Prize, two Victorian artists WB McInnes and John Long­staff won every year bar one. While the Art Gallery of New South Wales felt fortunate that Victorian Archibald had not left his Prize bequest to the National Gallery of Victoria, the Sydney Morning Herald was not well pleased.

In a small group of modernists resisting the traditionalism that had dominated the early Archibalds, Grace Crowley had entered the competition, only to be turned down by the trustees. The Bulletin understood that women artists were not in the running. Especially not modern women. Women might be painted, but not paint. The first woman artist to win, in 1938, was Nora Heysen, daughter of the famous Hans Heysen. The Sydney Morning Herald questioned the trust­ees’ sanity, calling her paintings and others a “chamber of horrors”. 

Controversy nearly always surrounds the prize-winning work, and critics are seldom kind to the winning artist, or in agreement as to whom should have won. In any case by the 1940s, the younger and more modern artists were becoming more frustrated with the same conservative, predominantly male choices made by the trustees; the critics, especially those in New South Wales were fuelling these frustrations with harsh criticisms of the prize-winning paint­ings. William Dobell came in for tremendous criticism when his work Portrait of the artist Joshua Smith was awarded the Prize in 1943. But that is the story for a different post. 

John Longstaff, winner in 1935

portrait of Banjo Paterson. 

Art Gallery NSW

Read Let's Face It: The history of the Archibald Prize was a book written by Peter Ross and published by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1999. I love this book!