Archibald Prize: The case of the thousands of missing portraits
The search is on for thousands of missing portraits as part of an exhibition celebrating the centenary of the always controversial Archibald Prize.
William Beckwith McInnes was a prolific, celebrated and in-demand portrait painter in the first third of the 20th century — but who remembers him now? He won the first Archibald Prize in 1921 and the next three in a row, and would notch seven wins across his career.
Three of his portraits of prime ministers — Stanley Bruce, James Scullin and Joseph Lyons — are in the collection at Parliament House in Canberra. Before he died in 1939, he was due to paint the newly elevated prime minister, Robert Menzies. He was adept at those official portraits of Australians great and good between the two world wars. But politicians were not his only subjects: surgeons and socialites also came within his view.
And “WB”, as his family refer to him, lovingly depicted his wife and children in portraits that have been passed through generations of McInneses as treasured heirlooms. His granddaughter, Vicki McInnes, is also an artist and can only marvel at WB’s painterly facility — his ability to capture an expression with just a few brushstrokes. He was also good at painting hands.
In a portrait WB McInnes painted of son Geoffrey, Vicki McInnes’s father, the boy of 10 or 11 is wearing a kilt, with the fingers of one hand splayed across his hip. Vicki McInnes says her father, whenever he was concentrating on something, would stand in that characteristic manner, just as his father had him pose for the portrait. “A painted portrait is different from a photograph, and hopefully better than a photograph — you can get more emotion into it,” she says. “That idea of family history is passed along with each of WB’s paintings.”
The Art Gallery of NSW, which awards the Archibald Prize, is organising an exhibition next year to mark the Archibald’s centenary. (It will also be the gallery’s 150th anniversary.) The exhibition, with the working title Archie 100, will bring together portraits from across the past 10 decades and show how ideas about portraiture, and what constitutes a sitter worthy of attention, have changed with the years.
Seven-time winner WB McInnes will certainly be represented. He won the inaugural Archibald in 1921 with a portrait of prominent Melbourne architect Harold Desbrowe-Annear, who designed the McInnes family home. That painting is in the AGNSW collection in Sydney. But the whereabouts of other portraits by McInnes is a mystery. One of them, of surgeon and photographer Julian Smith, has been tracked down to the home of Smith’s grandson in Victoria. It won the Archibald in 1936 and was the last of McInnes’s prize winners. Still at large is his winning portrait from the Archibald’s second year in 1922, a picture of University of Melbourne law professor Harrison Moore.
Natalie Wilson, curator of the Archie 100 exhibition, says the gallery is attempting to account for more than 6000 “Archibald works”: paintings that were winners, or finalists, or otherwise shown in the Archibald exhibition. More than half are yet to be found.
“I’m still trying to track them down, usually through private collectors,” Wilson says. “It’s a long list. We have written to and called every institution you can imagine around Australia: museums, galleries, libraries, regional galleries and major institutions. And from there we’re looking at schools, banks and private clubs that have small or large collections.”
Tracking down portraits is a little like following leads in an investigation or researching a family tree. As well as making the rounds of galleries and other collections, Wilson has deep-dived into newspaper archives such as Trove and used genealogy databases, looking for clues such as addresses and family names.
In the past few years the gallery has built up a record of prize-winning artworks — not only the Archibald but the Wynne, Sulman and Dobell prizes — and, with the Archibald centenary fast approaching, has stepped up its efforts, including appeals to the public for information.
“We didn’t really know how many works were in the first year (of the Archibald) because there wasn’t a published catalogue,” Wilson says. “We have since learned from reading press clippings that the gallery would pin a list to the wall, but we don’t have the list from 1921. Newspaper reports tell us that about 40 or 42 works were in the prize and, by a process of elimination, we have been able to deduce which works were in the prize.”
In some cases “missing” portraits have been found by a stroke of luck. Wilson was meeting friends for lunch at the Sydney Rowing Club in Abbotsford when she spotted a portrait hanging in the foyer. These days, she does not walk past a picture without a closer look. It was a portrait of one of the club’s founders, QL Deloitte, painted by Herbert Beecroft, and Wilson realised it was one of the missing works from the 1920s.
“We didn’t have an image of it, we didn’t know where it was,” she says. “Works just pop up in the most unlikely places. It was just by pure chance that I saw this portrait. I got my phone out and looked up the database and, sure enough, it was on the wall in the foyer.”
Wilson has not yet decided which works she will include in the Archie 100 exhibition, but she will limit the number to 100.
They will not necessarily be winning pictures — that would make for a very dry exhibition, she says — but she wants to highlight those portraits that have something to say about changes in art and society across the years.
It appears that about 10 of the portraits in the inaugural 1921 prize were miniatures, a format that was enjoying a revival at the turn of the 20th century and that was popular with female artists. Wilson has her eye on a miniature oval of ivory, 10cm high, that is in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.
The exquisite painting by Ada Whiting is of Miss Jessica Harcourt, a “mannequin” (clothes model) and actress of the 1920s, dressed in the flapper fashions of the day.
In the Archibald’s early decades, artists could enter as many times as they liked in a single year, and all pictures were shown in the prize exhibition. It explains how McInnes was able to enter 66 works in the years from 1921 to 1938. He was not the record-holder for Archibald entries, however. Another artist, Joseph Wolinski — one of the litigants in the William Dobell case in 1944 — entered the prize more than 100 times.
In 1946, the rules were changed so artists could enter fewer pictures, and portraits were selected for a curated exhibition.
“What also happened is that the number of women also dropped significantly,” Wilson says. “It’s an interesting phenomenon, once you start crunching the numbers. I think it was a very conservative time, and even though women were entering the prize, women weren’t being selected.”
Controversy has attended the Archibald since the beginning. George Lambert’s flamboyant Self-portrait with Gladioli, these days a highlight of the National Portrait Gallery’s collection, was disqualified in 1922 because Lambert was not resident in Australia at the time. (This year’s Archibald competition, scheduled for last month, was postponed until later this year because of the coronavirus shutdowns.)
Whether a picture was of a worthy sitter also was a matter of dispute, given the rule that the subject be a “man or woman distinguished in art, letters, science or politics”.
The first self-portrait to win the Archibald, in 1934 — by Henry Hanke, painted during the Depression in hardscrabble brown tones — wasn’t thought distinguished enough to take the prize. The Archibald became a battleground between the academic realist painters who dominated the award in the early years and proponents of mid-century modernism such as Dobell and Albert Tucker.
It came to a head when Dobell won in 1943 with his portrait of Mr Joshua Smith, the painting Wolinski and co-plaintiff Mary Edwell-Burke claimed was a caricature, not a portrait. The court ruled in Dobell’s favour.
Dobell’s portrait was damaged in a fire and was overpainted during a restoration. Wilson is not planning to show the picture in the Archie 100 exhibition but instead will display other paintings — such as Dobell’s The Billy Boy, also entered in the 1943 Archibald, and now at the Australian War Memorial — to illustrate the mid-century stand-off between realism and modernism.
“It happens quite a lot in the Archibald’s history that whenever there is some sort of controversy, it generates interest in the prize and you get a lot more entries the following year,” Wilson says. “The next time it happened was when it was awarded to John Bloomfield, who was disqualified, because it was determined that the portrait (of filmmaker Tim Burstall, in 1975) was taken from a photograph.”
With more than 3000 Archibald works yet to be found, Wilson has a wishlist of priorities. Tucker’s self-portrait from 1945 was in an exhibition at Heide Museum of Modern Art about a decade ago, but so far Wilson has been unable to contact the current owner.
Also missing is the 1933 winner, Charles Wheeler’s portrait of writer Ambrose Pratt, and an entry from 1923, Norman Carter’s portrait of poet Leon Gellert that is known only from a scanned image from a magazine. “It looks very interesting, but we have no idea what happened to it,” Wilson says. “Since 1923, it’s just lost.”
Yet other portraits have emerged serendipitously, like a chance encounter between old friends.
McInnes’s Archibald-winning portrait from 1936 is of Julian Smith, a respected surgeon and a foundation member of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons. In retirement he became a celebrated photographer, and he was a somewhat eccentric fellow who drove around Melbourne in a red Rolls-Royce while wearing his dressing-gown. McInnes’s portrait captures Smith’s intelligence and inquisitive nature.
The McInnes family has commissioned a biography of WB, and the author, Margot Tasca, was the link to the “missing” portrait of Smith. Her husband, Marcus Carey, is a doctor who knew of a surgeon also named Julian Smith. Tasca contacted the younger Smith, who is head of cardiothoracic surgery at Monash Heart. “He wrote back and said, ‘Yes, you’ve hit the jackpot’,” Tasca says. “He said the Archibald portrait is with his cousin, Clive.”
For Clive Smith, the portrait by McInnes was never missing; it is a treasured memory of his beloved grandfather, who died in 1947. “It’s the most wonderful portrait, a dead ringer of him,” Smith says. “It’s never left the walls of my family.”
If you have information about Archibald Prize pictures, contact the Art Gallery of NSW at Archie100@ag.nsw.gov.au.