Prize find as Archibald centenary nears

Clive Smith has fond memories of being a boy in the 1940s and spending Sundays with his grandfather, surgeon Julian Smith.

Clive Smith with WB McInnes’s winning portrait of his grandfather, Julian Smith, and his cousin, also Julian Smith. Picture: David Geraghty

Former banker Clive Smith has fond memories of being a boy in the 1940s and spending Sundays with his grandfather, surgeon and photographer Julian Smith, who would take pictures of visiting luminaries to Melbourne and then lunch on scrambled eggs and bread.

Julian Smith died in 1947 but his character and intense curiosity were captured in a portrait of him painted by Melbourne artist WB McInnes.

For Clive Smith, the portrait is a treasured memory of his grandfather — a “dead ringer of him” — and it also is of considerable interest to the Art Gallery of NSW.

As the 2021 centenary of the Archibald Prize approaches, the gallery is trying to complete its ­database of the more than 6000 portraits that have been hung since the first Archibald exhibition in 1921.

McInnes’s portrait of Dr Julian Smith won the Archibald in 1936 — it shows him bespectacled, wearing a goatee beard, and gripping the front of his waistcoat — but until last month the gallery had no idea of the picture’s whereabouts.

Mr Smith, 84, said he inherited the portrait from his father, also a surgeon named Julian Smith, and it has pride of place at his home.

“He was a very much-loved figure, an extraordinary man,” Mr Smith said of the grandfather he called Da.

“A famous surgeon to begin with, and he retired (from surgery) just before the war. He also became equally famous as a photographer. He was quite eccentric in many ways, but his bark was much worse than his bite.”

The portrait was found after inquiries by Melbourne author Margot Tasca, who is writing a ­biography of McInnes. Tasca’s husband Marcus Carey is a doctor and knew of another Julian Smith, a cardiothoracic surgeon and grandson of the Julian Smith in the portrait.

Mr Smith, formerly chairman of Deutsche Bank in Australia and New Zealand, has portraits of other family members.

McInnes painted his maternal grandfather, ­businessman and politician ­William Lawrence Baillieu, and William Dargie painted his father, Julian Smith.

He said McInnes, a seven-time winner of the Archibald Prize, had captured his beloved Da perfectly.

“You couldn’t get a better likeness,” he said.

“Other portraits are more abstract, aren’t they? I quite like portraits that portray a person as they actually were in life.”