Sydney’s portrait prize that stops the nation

Actor David Gulpilil is leaning by Liberal politician Trent Zimmerman when suddenly OzHarvest founder Ronni Kahn appears with artist Wendy Sharpe following. Not the people, but their portraits, which are being delivered in the final hours before the 2021 Archibald Prize deadline.

Some artists, such as Craig Ruddy, who has painted Gulpilil twice before for the Archibalds – winning controversially in 2004 with his charcoal drawing two worlds – have driven across the state, as he has from Byron Bay. Others have simply crossed the city, like 14-time finalist Paul Newton, who’s dashed from Dural, “getting every red light on the way”, with his self-portrait. “I’m a regular 11th hour deliverer,” confesses the two-time winner of the $1500 packing room prize; once with a portrait of radio host John Laws (1996), and again in 2001 with characters Roy Slaven and HG Nelson.

This century-old spectacle at the Art Gallery of NSW is one that head packer Brett Cuthbertson has witnessed for 40 years. His packing room team know his golden rule: “no wet paint”. Most entrants ignore it, he says. His favourite moment occurred in the early 1990s when dominatrix Madame Lash – Gretel Pinniger – arrived two hours past deadline.

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“She showed up in a fire engine with six guys – no shirts, just fire hats and suspenders – to carry her painting in,” Cuthbertson says. Her entry was accepted and she went on to become a finalist in 1993 and 1994.

Welcome to the colourful carnival that is Australia’s oldest and best known portrait prize – the Archibald – 100 years old this year.

Melbourne may have its horse race that stops a nation, but Sydney has its face that stops a nation; both are popular with the punters, and you can bet on the winners at Sportsbet.

The sporting analogy is as old as Guy Warren, the 100-year-old 1985 prize winner, but no other nation on earth has the same obsession with art prizes in general, and this portrait prize in particular, says art critic John McDonald.

“The Archibald ‘stops the nation’ in the same way and has a similar inflated status and recognition value as the Melbourne Cup,” McDonald says. “One could say its main appeal is as folklore, not as a great art exhibition. Treat it as high entertainment … For better or worse, it’s still the greatest publicity bonanza in Australian art.”

‘Treat it as high entertainment … For better or worse, it’s still the greatest publicity bonanza in Australian art.’

SMH art critic John McDonald

Art critic Robert Hughes in 1962 declared it “not so much a competition as a myth”. Former Art Gallery of NSW director Ed Capon used to call it “a discreet form of perving”, but the key to its success, he said, was that “the general public feels a strange sense of ownership of the Archibald” because it is “of the people, by the people for the people”.

This year, for its centenary celebrations, we can expect a little something else from the usual cocktail of controversy, celebrity, cruel critiques, catty condescension and conspiracy theories about the 11 trustees who choose the winner (much of the chatter nowadays is about the – constructive or pernicious – influence of artist/trustee Ben Quilty, McDonald says).

Alongside the finalists in the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes opening on June 5, the blockbuster Archie 100: A Century of the Archibald Prize will chart the changing face of our nation.

Since 2017, curator Natalie Wilson has sent about 25,000 emails and appeared on media across Australia to track down some of the 6000 works by 1500 artists who have been exhibited in the Archibald Prize since 1921. The show, which will tour nationally from November 2021, is not a collection of winners but an unearthing of the most interesting untold stories and unfamiliar portraits – some of them not seen since their Archibald hanging. The show is divided into different themes, such as celebrity and courting controversy, local heroes and national icons, with only one work per artist as a guiding rule, and bringing more women – artists and sitters – into the retrospective.

“A straight chronology was not going to cut it. In the first few decades the portraits were mainly old white grey-haired men painted in a sea of gravy brown backgrounds,” she jokes.

Only 10 women have won the prize, and only 17 times has it gone to female faces. It took 17 years for the first woman to win, Nora Heyson in 1938, who at 28 remains the youngest winner, and 99 years for an Indigenous winner, Vincent Namatjira in 2020.

His grandfather, Hermannsburg artist Albert Namatjira’s 1956 portrait, painted by the all-time record holder, eight-time Archibald winner William Dargie, is in the Archie 100 show. It is considered a watershed moment; the first Indigenous subject.

“At the time, Namatjira was a household name. Reproductions of his paintings were on the walls of every middle-class living room in Australia … he was very well known, a national icon, yet he was deprived citizenship. So when we think about it in the context of the history of the prize, it is quite astonishing that this conservative artist would select Albert Namatjira to paint,” Wilson says.

A year later, in 1957, thanks in part to the press coverage of the portrait in the year that TV began in Australia, he was granted restricted Australian citizenship, giving him the right to vote, have limited land rights and buy alcohol.

”It seems like, from all the people I’ve spoken to, that this will likely be the most popular work in the Archie 100 exhibition and possibly of all time,” Wilson says.

In the era of the White Australia policy, it was the first time portraiture had become political but by far not the first brouhaha.

“The Archibald has been controversial since day one,” Wilson says. Whether it be arguments about if the sitter was considered “distinguished in the arts”, as per the original prize instructions, or how the painting was completed (a signed declaration by the sitter assures it is painted not from a photo but in real life), it has always kept people talking.

More than 32,000 entries have been received since the prize began; by far the bulk are self-portraits or artists painting other artists. But because the prize is not acquisitive, the gallery does not keep them so the entries are returned to painters, only about 100 remain in the Art Gallery of NSW collection. Sometimes sitters buy or are given the works (some have been known to destroy their painting if they don’t like it). Many are probably still on the walls of family homes unrecognised as Archibald entrants, gathering dust in garages or perhaps painted over, Wilson says. Before 1946, everything that was entered was hung, but after that only finalists have made the art gallery walls.

“We’re hoping that this exhibition will bring some works out of the woodwork … especially those by women artists, as they have traditionally not been collected like male artists have been,” Wilson says.

Like a sleuth, Wilson has scoured artists’ garrets, museums, private collections, the War Memorial and universities across Australia and New Zealand for three years and narrowed her selection down to 100 paintings to best represent the prize’s 10 decades; three extras act as an introduction to the man who gives his name to the prize, J.F. Archibald.

There’s an irony that the namesake of Australia’s best-known prize for portraiture, the founding Bulletin editor, hated having his picture taken.

Born John Feltham Archibald, the Francophile changed his name to Jules François Archibald and had great visions for elevating Australia’s colonial culture to something more European.

He went on to become a trustee of the Art Gallery of NSW and, in 1900, commissioned Melbourne artist John Longstaff to paint a portrait of poet Henry Lawson.

He was apparently so pleased with it that he left money in his will for an annual portrait prize to document the people making a name for themselves in the arts at the time.

When he died without heirs in 1919, the £90,000 he left was split between the prize bearing his name (one tenth), the commissioning of the Archibald Fountain and a benevolent fund for journalists. The compound interest on that initial £9000 sum has seen the winner’s prize money grow to $100,000 in 2021.

The inaugural 1921 £400 prize went to Melbourne artist W.B. “Bill” McInnes, a Melbourne artist, for his portrait of architect H. Desbrowe Annear, a friend and neighbour of the Heidelberg School artist.

McInnes went on to win it a total of seven times, five times in the competition’s first six years.

“He won it so often the art world began to call the Archibald the McInnes bequest,” says Eric Riddler, the gallery’s visual resources librarian and unofficial Archibald historian.

The prize captured the public’s attention immediately and soon became part of popular culture. One of McInnes’ early entries, a portrait of his son Geoff, was emblazoned on MacRobertson’s chocolate boxes, the Melbourne-based confectionery company that produced Cherry Ripes and Freddo Frogs. Riddler has tracked down one of the rusty old 1930s tins on eBay and it now sits on his desk.

When Gwen Meredith, writer of the radio series Blue Hills, sat for artist Tempe Manning in 1948, the Archibald was written into the plotline of the popular familiar drama.

“When the Archibald Prize started in the 1920s, a fashion for all things Georgian meant that miniatures on ivory featured in early exhibitions,” Riddler says.

The so-called ‘Kit-Cat’ format (120 centimetres high by 90 centimetres wide) named for an 18th-century British club, whose members’ portraits were half standard length due to the size of the club room, were also popular in that era.

“It wasn’t until the 1931 competition, when Mervyn Napier Waller entered his two-metre-long portrait of his then wife and their pets, that oversized portraits became part of the Archibald history,” he says.

It would be another few decades before the pop art movement meant that large portraits became the norm from the 1960s.

The first real scandal occurred in 1934, Riddler says, with commercial artist Henry Hanke’s self-portrait in the tattered clothes he wore as a relief worker in the Great Depression. As a cost-cutting measure, Hanke used the earthworks he laboured with on the roads as the source of his pigments on the painting. It was the first self-portrait to be declared a winner.

“Some critics felt that Hanke, in such a dishevelled state, could not declare himself to be ‘distinguished in the arts’, but the public opinion was sympathetic and in keeping with Archibald’s Bulletin legacy,” Riddler says.

“But the real drama began in 1943 when the winner pushed the war off the front pages of the papers when William Dobell won for his painting of his friend Joshua Smith,” Wilson says.

When Dobell’s win was announced, two other entrants – Mary Edwards (whose real name was Mary Edwell-Burke) and Joseph Wolinski – took legal action against Dobell and the Trustees on the grounds that the painting was not a portrait as defined by the Archibald Bequest, but a caricature.

The case was heard in the Supreme Court in October 1944 and was seen by many as putting modern art on trial. The court eventually found in favour of Dobell’s work and ordered the claimants pay costs for Dobell and the Trustees. This was followed by an appeal and an unsuccessful demand to the Equity Court to restrain the Trustees from handing over the prize money.

A Mary Edwell-Burke 1942 self-portrait with a hand-carved frame will appear in Archie 100, and her great nephew will publish a book on the court case to tell her side of the story. Joseph Wolinski went on to earn the dubious title of the “biggest loser” of the Archibald Prize over the course of its history.

“He entered 107 times, none of them were winners,” Wilson says. “Most of which we were unable to locate. I have a good reason to suspect why he didn’t win – he wasn’t really a fabulous artist – but maybe his masterpieces are out there; we just haven’t found them.”

Visitors flocked to view Dobell’s “outrageously modern” work. They stood 10 people deep before it, and at one point a gallery attendant had to take the painting off the wall to persuade the crowd to go home, the gallery’s archives reveal.

A record 7800 people jammed into the gallery one afternoon and the exhibition had to be extended a month to cope with demand. When the Archibald show closed that year, 140,000 people had viewed the painting; 10 per cent of Sydney’s population.

Dobell sold the portrait in 1949 to Adelaide businessman Sir Edward Hayward, but in 1958 it was badly damaged by fire. It was restored in the 1980s, but even that was controversial, raising questions about whether the work could still be considered an original Dobell.

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It is not in the Archie 100, but several references to it are, including Brett Whiteley’s 1978 self-portrait of him holding the Joshua Smith painting in his hand. Whiteley remains the only artist to have won the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes in the same year.

“The interconnectedness of all these stories is astounding,” says Wilson, who like a painter stepping back to examine their portrait has had the benefit of examining all these paintings in a historical context while compiling the show.

The colour and movement has never only just been on the canvas. In January 1953, Sydney’s art students, including eventual winner John Olsen, stormed the gallery to protest against William Dargie’s seventh win.

In 1975, John Bloomfield’s portrait of Tim Burstall, painted from a blown-up photograph, was disqualified on the grounds that the portrait had to be painted from life. The prize was rejudged and awarded to Kevin Connor. Twice the prize was not awarded, in 1964 and 1980, on the grounds that there was no worthy winner.

And court cases challenging the winners have continued. When Craig Ruddy’s 2004 Gulpilil portrait, won both the then $35,000 first prize and the people’s choice award, rival artist Tony Johansen took unsuccessful legal action against the Art Gallery of NSW Trust, claiming it was a charcoal drawing, not a painting.

Loading

Wilson expects Archie 100 will continue to generate discussion and debate, and that Paul Newton’s Roy and HG Slavin will be a crowd pleaser. Unsurprisingly, given the natural drama of her treasure hunt for portraits, a camera crew has trailed Wilson to turn her quest into a reality TV show hosted by Rachel Griffiths. Some of her major “reveals” will air as the three-part part ABC series Finding the Archibald on June 15.

“As we’ve been talking to people across the nation I’ve learnt the passion people have about this prize … everyone has a vested interest in the Archibald,” she says.

Her aim is to show how the portrait prize and Australia has changed in 100 years.

“I think if someone like William Dargie could see the winners of today he’d probably roll in his grave.”

The Archibald Prize will be announced on June 4 and the Packing Room Prize on May 27. Archie 100: A century of the Archibald Prize, will run concurrently with the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes from June 5 to September 26 at the Art Gallery of NSW before touring to Bathurst, Canberra and interstate.

Fun facts: what you didn’t know about the Archibald Prize

Winning women
Only 10 women have won the Archibald prize in its 100-year history.

1. Nora Heysen, 1938
2. Judy Cassab, 1960 and 1967
3. Janet Dawson, 1973
4. Davida Allen, 1986
5. Wendy Sharpe, 1996
6. Cherry Hood, 2002
7. Del Kathryn Barton, 2008 and 2013
8. Fiona Lowry, 2014
9. Louise Hearman, 2016
10. Yvette Coppersmith, 2018

In 100 years the prize has been awarded only 17 times to works featuring female sitters.

Eager entrants
More than 32,000 entries have been received from Australia and New Zealand since the prize began in 1921. The record number of entries goes to artist Joseph Wolinski (1872-1955) with 107, none of them winners.

More than 6000 works by 1500 artists have been exhibited – one-third of those painters have been women. A record 1068 entries were received in 2020.

Portraits of the artists
Oldest winner: John Olsen, 77, in 2005
Youngest winner: Nora Heysen, 28, in 1938

Only one Indigenous painter, Vincent Namatjira, has won, in 2020. Only four times have subjects been Indigenous men.



Brett Whiteley remains the only artist to have won the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes in one year, 1978. Only two others, William Dobell (1948) and Sam Leach (2010), have come close to his record, winning both the Archibald and the Wynne prizes.

Sitting ducks
Most painted artist:
Melbourne artist Charles Bush, with 18 portraits (17 self-portraits)
Painter Lloyd Rees, 16 portraits (three self-portraits).

Most painted subject, not including self-portraits:
Gallerist Ray Hughes, 14 times between 1974 and 2017
Writer Dame Mary Gilmore, 11 times between 1928 and 1961
Sculptor Lyndon Dadswell, 10 times between 1932 and 1969



Did you know
First prize has grown from £400 in 1921 to $100,000 in 2021, thanks to the compound interest of J.F. Archibald’s initial £9000 bequest.

Only twice in 100 years, in 1964 and 1980, has no winner been awarded on the grounds that there was no entry worthy of the prize.

Up to and including 1945, all entries were hung; after that, a selection of finalists was made for exhibition.

Before 1946, there was no limit to the number of works an artist could submit.

From 1946 to 2002, each artist could submit up to two works, and both might be selected; since 2003, the limit is one work per artist.

Actor David Gulpilil is leaning by Liberal politician Trent Zimmerman when suddenly OzHarvest founder Ronni Kahn appears with artist Wendy Sharpe following. Not the people, but their portraits, which are being delivered in the final hours before the 2021 Archibald Prize deadline.

Some artists, such as Craig Ruddy, who has painted Gulpilil twice before for the Archibalds – winning controversially in 2004 with his charcoal drawing two worlds – have driven across the state, as he has from Byron Bay. Others have simply crossed the city, like 14-time finalist Paul Newton, who’s dashed from Dural, “getting every red light on the way”, with his self-portrait. “I’m a regular 11th hour deliverer,” confesses the two-time winner of the $1500 packing room prize; once with a portrait of radio host John Laws (1996), and again in 2001 with characters Roy Slaven and HG Nelson.

This century-old spectacle at the Art Gallery of NSW is one that head packer Brett Cuthbertson has witnessed for 40 years. His packing room team know his golden rule: “no wet paint”. Most entrants ignore it, he says. His favourite moment occurred in the early 1990s when dominatrix Madame Lash – Gretel Pinniger – arrived two hours past deadline.

Loading

“She showed up in a fire engine with six guys – no shirts, just fire hats and suspenders – to carry her painting in,” Cuthbertson says. Her entry was accepted and she went on to become a finalist in 1993 and 1994.

Welcome to the colourful carnival that is Australia’s oldest and best known portrait prize – the Archibald – 100 years old this year.

Melbourne may have its horse race that stops a nation, but Sydney has its face that stops a nation; both are popular with the punters, and you can bet on the winners at Sportsbet.

The sporting analogy is as old as Guy Warren, the 100-year-old 1985 prize winner, but no other nation on earth has the same obsession with art prizes in general, and this portrait prize in particular, says art critic John McDonald.

“The Archibald ‘stops the nation’ in the same way and has a similar inflated status and recognition value as the Melbourne Cup,” McDonald says. “One could say its main appeal is as folklore, not as a great art exhibition. Treat it as high entertainment … For better or worse, it’s still the greatest publicity bonanza in Australian art.”

‘Treat it as high entertainment … For better or worse, it’s still the greatest publicity bonanza in Australian art.’

SMH art critic John McDonald

Art critic Robert Hughes in 1962 declared it “not so much a competition as a myth”. Former Art Gallery of NSW director Ed Capon used to call it “a discreet form of perving”, but the key to its success, he said, was that “the general public feels a strange sense of ownership of the Archibald” because it is “of the people, by the people for the people”.

This year, for its centenary celebrations, we can expect a little something else from the usual cocktail of controversy, celebrity, cruel critiques, catty condescension and conspiracy theories about the 11 trustees who choose the winner (much of the chatter nowadays is about the – constructive or pernicious – influence of artist/trustee Ben Quilty, McDonald says).

Alongside the finalists in the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes opening on June 5, the blockbuster Archie 100: A Century of the Archibald Prize will chart the changing face of our nation.

Since 2017, curator Natalie Wilson has sent about 25,000 emails and appeared on media across Australia to track down some of the 6000 works by 1500 artists who have been exhibited in the Archibald Prize since 1921. The show, which will tour nationally from November 2021, is not a collection of winners but an unearthing of the most interesting untold stories and unfamiliar portraits – some of them not seen since their Archibald hanging. The show is divided into different themes, such as celebrity and courting controversy, local heroes and national icons, with only one work per artist as a guiding rule, and bringing more women – artists and sitters – into the retrospective.

“A straight chronology was not going to cut it. In the first few decades the portraits were mainly old white grey-haired men painted in a sea of gravy brown backgrounds,” she jokes.

Only 10 women have won the prize, and only 17 times has it gone to female faces. It took 17 years for the first woman to win, Nora Heyson in 1938, who at 28 remains the youngest winner, and 99 years for an Indigenous winner, Vincent Namatjira in 2020.

His grandfather, Hermannsburg artist Albert Namatjira’s 1956 portrait, painted by the all-time record holder, eight-time Archibald winner William Dargie, is in the Archie 100 show. It is considered a watershed moment; the first Indigenous subject.

“At the time, Namatjira was a household name. Reproductions of his paintings were on the walls of every middle-class living room in Australia … he was very well known, a national icon, yet he was deprived citizenship. So when we think about it in the context of the history of the prize, it is quite astonishing that this conservative artist would select Albert Namatjira to paint,” Wilson says.

A year later, in 1957, thanks in part to the press coverage of the portrait in the year that TV began in Australia, he was granted restricted Australian citizenship, giving him the right to vote, have limited land rights and buy alcohol.

”It seems like, from all the people I’ve spoken to, that this will likely be the most popular work in the Archie 100 exhibition and possibly of all time,” Wilson says.

In the era of the White Australia policy, it was the first time portraiture had become political but by far not the first brouhaha.

“The Archibald has been controversial since day one,” Wilson says. Whether it be arguments about if the sitter was considered “distinguished in the arts”, as per the original prize instructions, or how the painting was completed (a signed declaration by the sitter assures it is painted not from a photo but in real life), it has always kept people talking.

More than 32,000 entries have been received since the prize began; by far the bulk are self-portraits or artists painting other artists. But because the prize is not acquisitive, the gallery does not keep them so the entries are returned to painters, only about 100 remain in the Art Gallery of NSW collection. Sometimes sitters buy or are given the works (some have been known to destroy their painting if they don’t like it). Many are probably still on the walls of family homes unrecognised as Archibald entrants, gathering dust in garages or perhaps painted over, Wilson says. Before 1946, everything that was entered was hung, but after that only finalists have made the art gallery walls.

“We’re hoping that this exhibition will bring some works out of the woodwork … especially those by women artists, as they have traditionally not been collected like male artists have been,” Wilson says.

Like a sleuth, Wilson has scoured artists’ garrets, museums, private collections, the War Memorial and universities across Australia and New Zealand for three years and narrowed her selection down to 100 paintings to best represent the prize’s 10 decades; three extras act as an introduction to the man who gives his name to the prize, J.F. Archibald.

There’s an irony that the namesake of Australia’s best-known prize for portraiture, the founding Bulletin editor, hated having his picture taken.

Born John Feltham Archibald, the Francophile changed his name to Jules François Archibald and had great visions for elevating Australia’s colonial culture to something more European.

He went on to become a trustee of the Art Gallery of NSW and, in 1900, commissioned Melbourne artist John Longstaff to paint a portrait of poet Henry Lawson.

He was apparently so pleased with it that he left money in his will for an annual portrait prize to document the people making a name for themselves in the arts at the time.

When he died without heirs in 1919, the £90,000 he left was split between the prize bearing his name (one tenth), the commissioning of the Archibald Fountain and a benevolent fund for journalists. The compound interest on that initial £9000 sum has seen the winner’s prize money grow to $100,000 in 2021.

The inaugural 1921 £400 prize went to Melbourne artist W.B. “Bill” McInnes, a Melbourne artist, for his portrait of architect H. Desbrowe Annear, a friend and neighbour of the Heidelberg School artist.

McInnes went on to win it a total of seven times, five times in the competition’s first six years.

“He won it so often the art world began to call the Archibald the McInnes bequest,” says Eric Riddler, the gallery’s visual resources librarian and unofficial Archibald historian.

The prize captured the public’s attention immediately and soon became part of popular culture. One of McInnes’ early entries, a portrait of his son Geoff, was emblazoned on MacRobertson’s chocolate boxes, the Melbourne-based confectionery company that produced Cherry Ripes and Freddo Frogs. Riddler has tracked down one of the rusty old 1930s tins on eBay and it now sits on his desk.

When Gwen Meredith, writer of the radio series Blue Hills, sat for artist Tempe Manning in 1948, the Archibald was written into the plotline of the popular familiar drama.

“When the Archibald Prize started in the 1920s, a fashion for all things Georgian meant that miniatures on ivory featured in early exhibitions,” Riddler says.

The so-called ‘Kit-Cat’ format (120 centimetres high by 90 centimetres wide) named for an 18th-century British club, whose members’ portraits were half standard length due to the size of the club room, were also popular in that era.

“It wasn’t until the 1931 competition, when Mervyn Napier Waller entered his two-metre-long portrait of his then wife and their pets, that oversized portraits became part of the Archibald history,” he says.

It would be another few decades before the pop art movement meant that large portraits became the norm from the 1960s.

The first real scandal occurred in 1934, Riddler says, with commercial artist Henry Hanke’s self-portrait in the tattered clothes he wore as a relief worker in the Great Depression. As a cost-cutting measure, Hanke used the earthworks he laboured with on the roads as the source of his pigments on the painting. It was the first self-portrait to be declared a winner.

“Some critics felt that Hanke, in such a dishevelled state, could not declare himself to be ‘distinguished in the arts’, but the public opinion was sympathetic and in keeping with Archibald’s Bulletin legacy,” Riddler says.

“But the real drama began in 1943 when the winner pushed the war off the front pages of the papers when William Dobell won for his painting of his friend Joshua Smith,” Wilson says.

When Dobell’s win was announced, two other entrants – Mary Edwards (whose real name was Mary Edwell-Burke) and Joseph Wolinski – took legal action against Dobell and the Trustees on the grounds that the painting was not a portrait as defined by the Archibald Bequest, but a caricature.

The case was heard in the Supreme Court in October 1944 and was seen by many as putting modern art on trial. The court eventually found in favour of Dobell’s work and ordered the claimants pay costs for Dobell and the Trustees. This was followed by an appeal and an unsuccessful demand to the Equity Court to restrain the Trustees from handing over the prize money.

A Mary Edwell-Burke 1942 self-portrait with a hand-carved frame will appear in Archie 100, and her great nephew will publish a book on the court case to tell her side of the story. Joseph Wolinski went on to earn the dubious title of the “biggest loser” of the Archibald Prize over the course of its history.

“He entered 107 times, none of them were winners,” Wilson says. “Most of which we were unable to locate. I have a good reason to suspect why he didn’t win – he wasn’t really a fabulous artist – but maybe his masterpieces are out there; we just haven’t found them.”

Visitors flocked to view Dobell’s “outrageously modern” work. They stood 10 people deep before it, and at one point a gallery attendant had to take the painting off the wall to persuade the crowd to go home, the gallery’s archives reveal.

A record 7800 people jammed into the gallery one afternoon and the exhibition had to be extended a month to cope with demand. When the Archibald show closed that year, 140,000 people had viewed the painting; 10 per cent of Sydney’s population.

Dobell sold the portrait in 1949 to Adelaide businessman Sir Edward Hayward, but in 1958 it was badly damaged by fire. It was restored in the 1980s, but even that was controversial, raising questions about whether the work could still be considered an original Dobell.

Loading

It is not in the Archie 100, but several references to it are, including Brett Whiteley’s 1978 self-portrait of him holding the Joshua Smith painting in his hand. Whiteley remains the only artist to have won the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes in the same year.

“The interconnectedness of all these stories is astounding,” says Wilson, who like a painter stepping back to examine their portrait has had the benefit of examining all these paintings in a historical context while compiling the show.

The colour and movement has never only just been on the canvas. In January 1953, Sydney’s art students, including eventual winner John Olsen, stormed the gallery to protest against William Dargie’s seventh win.

In 1975, John Bloomfield’s portrait of Tim Burstall, painted from a blown-up photograph, was disqualified on the grounds that the portrait had to be painted from life. The prize was rejudged and awarded to Kevin Connor. Twice the prize was not awarded, in 1964 and 1980, on the grounds that there was no worthy winner.

And court cases challenging the winners have continued. When Craig Ruddy’s 2004 Gulpilil portrait, won both the then $35,000 first prize and the people’s choice award, rival artist Tony Johansen took unsuccessful legal action against the Art Gallery of NSW Trust, claiming it was a charcoal drawing, not a painting.

Loading

Wilson expects Archie 100 will continue to generate discussion and debate, and that Paul Newton’s Roy and HG Slavin will be a crowd pleaser. Unsurprisingly, given the natural drama of her treasure hunt for portraits, a camera crew has trailed Wilson to turn her quest into a reality TV show hosted by Rachel Griffiths. Some of her major “reveals” will air as the three-part part ABC series Finding the Archibald on June 15.

“As we’ve been talking to people across the nation I’ve learnt the passion people have about this prize … everyone has a vested interest in the Archibald,” she says.

Her aim is to show how the portrait prize and Australia has changed in 100 years.

“I think if someone like William Dargie could see the winners of today he’d probably roll in his grave.”

The Archibald Prize will be announced on June 4 and the Packing Room Prize on May 27. Archie 100: A century of the Archibald Prize, will run concurrently with the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes from June 5 to September 26 at the Art Gallery of NSW before touring to Bathurst, Canberra and interstate.

Fun facts: what you didn’t know about the Archibald Prize

Winning women
Only 10 women have won the Archibald prize in its 100-year history.

1. Nora Heysen, 1938
2. Judy Cassab, 1960 and 1967
3. Janet Dawson, 1973
4. Davida Allen, 1986
5. Wendy Sharpe, 1996
6. Cherry Hood, 2002
7. Del Kathryn Barton, 2008 and 2013
8. Fiona Lowry, 2014
9. Louise Hearman, 2016
10. Yvette Coppersmith, 2018

In 100 years the prize has been awarded only 17 times to works featuring female sitters.

Eager entrants
More than 32,000 entries have been received from Australia and New Zealand since the prize began in 1921. The record number of entries goes to artist Joseph Wolinski (1872-1955) with 107, none of them winners.

More than 6000 works by 1500 artists have been exhibited – one-third of those painters have been women. A record 1068 entries were received in 2020.

Portraits of the artists
Oldest winner: John Olsen, 77, in 2005
Youngest winner: Nora Heysen, 28, in 1938

Only one Indigenous painter, Vincent Namatjira, has won, in 2020. Only four times have subjects been Indigenous men.



Brett Whiteley remains the only artist to have won the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes in one year, 1978. Only two others, William Dobell (1948) and Sam Leach (2010), have come close to his record, winning both the Archibald and the Wynne prizes.

Sitting ducks
Most painted artist:
Melbourne artist Charles Bush, with 18 portraits (17 self-portraits)
Painter Lloyd Rees, 16 portraits (three self-portraits).

Most painted subject, not including self-portraits:
Gallerist Ray Hughes, 14 times between 1974 and 2017
Writer Dame Mary Gilmore, 11 times between 1928 and 1961
Sculptor Lyndon Dadswell, 10 times between 1932 and 1969



Did you know
First prize has grown from £400 in 1921 to $100,000 in 2021, thanks to the compound interest of J.F. Archibald’s initial £9000 bequest.

Only twice in 100 years, in 1964 and 1980, has no winner been awarded on the grounds that there was no entry worthy of the prize.

Up to and including 1945, all entries were hung; after that, a selection of finalists was made for exhibition.

Before 1946, there was no limit to the number of works an artist could submit.

From 1946 to 2002, each artist could submit up to two works, and both might be selected; since 2003, the limit is one work per artist.