Archibald Prize 2017: Wilkinson, Bell, Forster, Triggs among familiar faces

Lisa Wilkinson, Gillian Triggs and Robert Forster among the familiar faces to grace the walls as packing Room Prize announced.

Archibald Prize 2017 finalist and Packing Room Prize winner Peter Smeeth with 'Lisa Wilkinson AM' oil on linen

John Bell, Gillian Triggs, Robert Forster, John Olsen, Lisa Wilkinson, Michael Chaney and Rupert Myer are some of the familiar faces who will grace the walls of this year’s Archibald Prize.

The Art Gallery of NSW announced this morning the 43 finalists in the running for the Archibald Prize, now in its 96th year. Some of the artists with strong works in contention include Mitch Cairns, who has painted fellow artist Agatha Gothe-Snape, Anh Do’s JC (actor Jack Charles); Nicholas Harding’s portrait of John Olsen, himself a former Archibald winner and, in his youth, an Archibald protester, and Jun Chen, for Ray Hughes.

• What do you think of this year’s finalists? Check out the gallery below and deliver your verdict in the comments box at the bottom of the page.

Archibald Prize 2017

VIEW GALLERY

Today’s announcement of the finalists coincided as usual with the announcement of the Packing Room Prize, which this year went to Peter Smeeth for his portrait of Lisa Wilkinson.

There will be more than usual scrutiny on that category this year because its judge, packer-in-chief Steve Peters, is retiring from the gallery after 34 years.

Peters has commanded 51 per cent of the packing Room Prize vote since it was first awarded in 1991. Now he’s moving on, leaving the responsibility to Brett Cuthbertson.

The Packing Room Prize is renowned as something of a mixed honour: never in Archibald history has its winner gone on to win the major prize. Tim Storrier has won both awards — albeit two years apart.

Peters has resolute tastes as a judge, and he certainly knows what he likes. First of all, the likeness needs to be impeccable. In a profile published in The Weekend Australian on Saturday, Peters explained his portraiture preferences to Penny Durham: “For us here in the packing room the work has got to look like the subject, and the subject has to be someone popular who the average Joe can recognise: there’s some wonderful paintings made of doctors, whoever, that are wonderful works but the average person wouldn’t know who they are. But No 1, the work’s got to be good, which knocks out 94 per cent of them.”

This year, Peters sat as the subject for two paintings entered into the Archibald: one by Lucy Culliton, and the other by Tianli Zu. Culliton’s portrait, Finished packing, is included among the finalists.

The Archibald, worth $100,000 to the winner, is by far the nation’s most popular art competition, with crowds packing every year into the Art Gallery of NSW to see the portraits chosen by Trustees as finalists. There are various rules, most of which are followed by the entrants: the pictures must be paintings and painted from life.

According to the bequest from former Bulletin editor JF Archibald, the portraits should be “preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in art, letters, science or politics, painted by any artist resident in Australasia.”

Artists can only enter one work each year, but they are allowed to enter one of the related awards at the same time: the Wynne Prize for landscape painting and Sulman prize for best genre painting. The late Brett Whiteley remains the only artist to have won all three awards in the same year, back in 1978.

The award was first awarded in 1921, and there have been plenty of controversies along the way. One of the most absurd and far-reaching scandals centred on William Dobell and his 1943 winning portrait of fellow artist Joshua Smith: the artist was forced to defend himself in court, accused of creating a caricature instead of a portrait. Dobell won the case — some observers later noticed just how much Smith came to resemble his portrait as the years passed — but neither artist nor subject ever really recovered from the scrutiny.

There’s always a carnival atmosphere at the AGNSW when the Archibald comes around. It’s the Melbourne Cup of the art world, the one day of the year when some of the national conversation turns to the business of painting. Everyone seems to have an opinion on the best pictures in the show, as well as the quality of finalists selected each year. And sometimes, among all the enormous heads and delicate egos and celebrity faces, some real gems emerge.

This year’s winners will be announced on July 28.

Tomorrow in The Australian, our national art critic Christopher Allen casts his verdict on the Archibald finalists