Australian artist Ralph Heimans is achieving remarkable success in Europe. Credit: Edwina Pickles
Even though nine years have passed since Ralph Heimans was driven through the gates of Buckingham Palace for the most crucial 60 minutes of his career, the Australian artist is still bombarded with one big question: what's the Queen like?
Heimans is armed with a good answer when I ask too. "She really does have an aura. If such a thing exists in this world, she has it. Although it might have helped that when I met her she was wearing the robes of state, encrusted in jewels and walking with four footmen carrying her 18-foot long robe. But I honestly was struck."
Ralph Heimans' work, Coronation Theatre, being installed inside Westminster Abbey.Credit: Getty
His more enduring insight into the Queen hangs in Westminster Abbey - a 2.5-metre high by 3.4-metre wide portrait commissioned to celebrate her 60 years on the throne. Heimans, an outsider of sorts in the Australian art world, was the only painter invited to mark the moment and was granted an hour-long sitting with the monarch in the Yellow Drawing Room of Buckingham Palace in 2012. The encounter firmly established him as the portraitist of choice for the royal houses of Europe and a genuine Australian success story – albeit not a hugely well-known one.
“Just think about it,” says Michael Kirby, the former High Court judge who helped Heimans win the job. “The only portrait of the Queen for her diamond jubilee was done by an Australian. And it has been acquired by Westminster Abbey and will be there for hundreds of years.”
When we first speak over Zoom, London is enduring another coronavirus lockdown. Heimans has not conducted any in-person sittings all year.
"This pandemic has reminded me how much portraitists depend on human-to-human contact – the sitting, the initial exchange and spark that occurs between the subject and the artists is irreplaceable," he says.
"I think there's a narrative here and in Australia that the arts can take a hit because it is not essential, which is very distressing. The arts are what keep us afloat during these times of distress."
Ralph Heimans’ portrait of the Prince of Wales.
He laughs when I ask whether the pandemic might inspire an era of portraits featuring masks. “The eyes are the window to the soul and thankfully we can at least still see those. What’s amazing is how easily we can still recognise people with a mask on – how little information we require, within milliseconds, to identify somebody. The brain is incredible.”
Heimans will often start a major work by tackling the eyes. “It’s all in the eyes. When I have a blank canvas, as soon as you paint the eyes, it starts to breathe and it starts to tell you what the painting needs.” His distress when fathers’ rights activist Tim Haries spray painted “HELP” over the Queen’s portrait in 2013 was slightly offset by relief the vandal had missed her eyes.
"A portrait painter is a little bit like a sculptor – creating a form out of stone. You try to breathe life into a figure. It's not just a superficial thing of how they look. It's really how they move, how they feel, how they think. It's almost like being an actor – you have to inhabit that person."
Ralph Heimans has lived in south London for 11 years. Credit: Edwina Pickles
The roll call of Heiman’s famous subjects is striking. He immortalised Prince Philip in 2017 and Prince Charles the following year thanks to a commission funded by billionaire Anthony Pratt and partly orchestrated by Paul Keating, whose support for Heimans momentarily outweighed his republican leanings. Pratt’s friend, businessman Ross Fitzgerald, is also friends with Keating and the former prime minister became something of a middle man in suggesting Heimans might be the right choice to paint the future king.
“So, yes, a portrait of Prince Charles came about through Paul Keating, which is ... unexpected,” Heimans laughs. “But when you think about it, those two men connect really well, oddly, with their passion for the environment, art and architecture.”
Keating thinks the startling boyish 50-year-old artist is only just getting started: “We are going to see a lot more of Ralph ... there’s going to be an even bigger Ralph coming,” Keating tells me.
"Ralph is interested in beauty, a matter which has gone out of fashion. And of course I've been interested in beauty per se all my life so when you run into somewhat of a kindred spirit you do find something of a common cause."
Heimans’ 2017 portrait of Prince Philip is set in the Grand Corridor at Windsor Castle.Credit: Buckingham Palace/AP
Heimans' portraits of Danish Crown Prince Frederik and his Tasmanian-born wife Princess Mary hang in a 17th century castle north of Copenhagen. Labor lion Tom Uren and Murdoch family matriarch Dame Elisabeth have also sat for the Sydney-born talent, as have billionaire business identities Sir Frederick Barclay and Darla Moore.
To commemorate the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death in 2016, publisher Random House picked Heimans to paint six literary icons including Booker Prize winning authors Margaret Atwood and Howard Jacobson, American writer Gillian Flynn and Norwegian crime novelist Jo Nesbo. He has also painted actor Dame Judi Dench and one-time Sydney Symphony Orchestra conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy.
Ralph Heimans’ portrait of author Margaret Atwood.
He is also the creative genius behind the official portrait of former governor-general Dame Quentin Bryce in the Members Hall at Parliament House, and Radical Restraint, the National Portrait Gallery's evocative tribute to the trailblazing legal giant Kirby.
Kirby agrees the London-based Heimans is not celebrated at home to the extent he deserves. "Australia's like that, though," the former judge says. "Australia doesn't celebrate its heroes. Indeed it is sceptical of heroism, and tends to think that foreigners are by nature more gifted. We've had many people in Australia who have had to go overseas to get discovered. But I do think Ralph was discovered before he went to London."
Heimans only came to paint Radical Restraint in 1996 after a chance conversation between Kirby and the painter's documentary maker father Frank.
"We really did click," Heimans says. "He admired my work, which was wonderful, and I admired what he stood for, his bravery and his judicial philosophy. We became friends."
Many years later Kirby would copy Heimans into an email he wrote suggesting Canberra’s National Portrait Gallery commission a piece for the Queen’s diamond jubilee. “I read the email, called Michael and said, ‘what are you cooking up?’ and he said ‘would you like to do this portrait?‘, and I replied ‘absolutely’.” John Dauth, Australia’s high commissioner to London at the time and a former press secretary to Prince Charles, took the pitch to Buckingham Palace. Ten months later the green light was granted and Heimans was whisked through the gates for the all-important sitting.
'You try to breathe life into a figure. It's not just a superficial thing of how they look. It's how they move, how they feel, how they think.'
Portrait painter Ralph Heimans
There's an element of destiny to Heimans' extraordinary success. Some of his first memories feature drawing and painting. "From a very early age I realised my identity was an artist," he says from the south London home he shares with wife Tami and their daughters Ellie-Rose and Hannah. "I had a very clear drive. It was from before I could write. I would sit alone for hours on end and just draw. I don't ever recall a bored moment in my childhood because I could just pick up a pencil."
While Frank made documentaries, Heimans’ mother Josette taught French. His brother Jeremy would co-found activist group GetUp! in 2005. It was at the family home in Cremorne on Sydney’s lower north shore where a 14-year-old Heimans fell in love with oils. “The experience of oils was indescribable. I set up a corner in the dining room of the family house and that was it. I basically never left that space for the rest of school.”
Ralph Heimans’ portrait of actor Dame Judi Dench.Credit: Courtesy Ralph Heimans
Heimans would go on to win the now defunct National Art Award aged just 17 and used the $2500 prize money to spend three months travelling Europe in search of an art school. But this was the 1980s and Heiman's interest in traditional European style was thoroughly unfashionable, even discouraged. He scoped out prestigious academies in Florence, Milan, London and Vienna but was disappointed they all focused on theory over technique.
He returned to Australia dejected but determined. At one point Frank and Josette took their son to see a psychologist. When the doctor asked what was wrong, his exasperated parents blurted out in near-unison, "He wants to be an artist!"
When the doctor asked what was wrong, his exasperated parents blurted out in near-unison, 'He wants to be an artist!'.
"It was like a scene out of a Woody Allen movie," Heimans laughs. "The look on the psychologist's face was sort of like 'who am I supposed to be evaluating here?' It didn't take long before they did a complete about-face and were very supportive and it has been so important to have that."
Conscious of his parents' concerns, Heimans enrolled to study architecture at Sydney University. "It was a bit odd because I was trying to design renaissance buildings in Ultimo, which did not go down well with the tutor." He eventually graduated with a degree in fine arts and pure mathematics – the latter of which he calls on to paint the intricate structural surrounds of portrait subjects.
"When you study pure maths and you take it to a higher level, it's all about dealing with spatial issues and problems which keep repeating in portraiture. When you paint realistically it's quite empirical, it's quite scientific and there's a lot of left brain that goes into it."
Radical Restraint, featuring former High Court judge Michael Kirby, is one of the most popular pieces at Canberra's National Portrait Gallery.Credit: Heath Missen
Heimans’ first commission was from his architecture lecturer, Trevor Howells. Another pivotal moment was when a Polish artist Heimans names only as Ziggy – an emigrant from Krakow “who had virtually stepped out of the 19th century” – heard of the promising young talent and landed on his Sydney doorstep offering lessons.
"It was the most unusual context in which to receive a rigorous European artistic education but I did, somehow, find this guy," Heimans says. The two ultimately fell out and Heimans remains guarded about the mentorship. "It was of its time. It helped me understand a logic about oil painting technique that I have developed since then but the whole thing does feel very distant even if it was foundational. It was very rigid and I had to break away from it to find my own path."
Heimans’ work is unique in that he builds a narrative around the subject, often borrowing important moments from their past. The Queen sat for her diamond jubilee portrait at Buckingham Palace but the painting is set in Westminster Abbey where she was crowned in 1953.
"It's not about getting the likeness," Heimans says of his approach. "That's the first level. It's about trying to capture someone's essence." He has sometimes spent more than a year working out a concept and composition before applying the first blotch of oil to canvas.
"The whole physical act of having to work out the puzzle engages the viewer. For me, a painting has to draw the attention of the entire room. It's not something you look at as you walk past. You have to be able to stand in front of that painting for a whole hour."
Ralph Heiman’s portrait of Princess Mary helped introduce the Tasmanian-born royal to Denmark.Credit: Museum of National History
National Portrait Gallery of Australia director Karen Quinlan praises Heimans’ storytelling, citing the subtle inclusion of Hobart’s Constitution Dock in the portrait of Princess Mary even though it is set in Denmark’s Fredensborg Palace.
"It's easy to be dazzled by the astonishing accuracy and detail of Ralph's paintings and his great ability in creating a 'likeness'," she says. "But beneath the surface there is consummate draughtsmanship as well as a concept that often has multiple layers and has been very carefully planned, considered and researched."
Mette Skougaard, the director of Denmark's Museum of National History, says crowds flock to the painting of Princess Mary and Prince Frederik. "These commissions can be tough because you have to live up to standards and traditions but at the same time also give it your personal touch and personal interpretation.”
Not everyone is a fan, though. When Heimans unveiled his 2014 portrait of Quentin Bryce, art critic Andrew Frost lampooned it as a "shambles of hokey symbolism and compositional trickiness". Heimans portrayed Australia's first female governor-general in a suffragette purple jacket and included other subtle nods to her favourite causes.
Ralph Heiman's portrait of Dame Quentin Bryce hangs in the Members Hall of Parliament House.
Frost’s scathing verdict summed up the views of a small band of detractors who believe Heimans’ depictions are almost too real and not contemporary enough. In any event, Bryce loved her artistic depiction. “As a mathematician and a student of architecture, Ralph’s composition is exquisite,” the former governor-general says. “The individual is not just seen in physical form but is revealed to be a composite of influences as a person with depth. I was astounded at the level of research and observation that he applied as part of the creative process for my portrait.”
Art dealer Philip Bacon met Heimans while the Bryce piece was being constructed and the two had a long conversation about the career challenges the young painter would face.
“Expat artists can often fade away unless they come home often for exhibitions, which is why people like Jeffrey Smart, Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan would come back every couple of years as the prodigal son and say, ‘oh by the way I’ve got 30 new pictures to sell’,” Bacon says.
“Of course that isn’t open to Ralph because he paints maybe one major portrait a year. There’s nobody who paints like him. He really has developed so much his own handwriting, which is so important but so difficult when you are working in an established area like portrait painting – a lot of masters have gone before. And you just can’t keep doing the huge blow-up heads painted from photographs, which is what the Archibald Prize has become over the past couple of decades. There’s no future in that.”
Ralph Heiman's portrait of legendary Sydney Symphony Orchestra conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy.
Heimans says the criticism doesn't really affect him. "Some people think I've elbowed my way to the top as some kind of establishment figure who goes to all the right parties. Nothing could be further from the truth. I feel lucky to have had the commissions I've had but they haven't been through any degree of self-promotion at all."
In a sign he might be on the right track, Heimans was sorting through some old files recently when he stumbled on a decades-old handwritten 'wish list' of identities he one day hoped to paint. The Queen's name was at the very top.
“I thought, ‘well I can tick that one off.’ I really do love what I do. We’ve got one life and this is my voice. But there’s still room to grow. I don’t even feel I’ve come out my shell yet, artistically. There’s so much more I can do.”