Rachel Perrin’s Bruce McWilliam portrait in the running for Portia Geach prize

Taken from portrait of Bruce McWilliam by Rachel Perrin.

Finally sanity has prevailed in the Australian art world.

A portrait of Seven billionaire Kerry Stokes’s consigliore Bruce McWilliam by Rachel Perrin has been selected as a finalist in the Portia Geach Memorial Award, Australia’s most prestigious art prize for portraiture by women artists.

This year’s winner will be announced on 1 August. The finalists — including McWilliam and his smartphone — will then hang from August 2 to September 15 at the S.H. Ervin Gallery on Sydney’s Observatory Hill.

Perrin’s portrait of the storied media fixer and legendary Sydney property trader first popped up on Margin Call’s radar when it was submitted for this year’s Archibald Prize.

As we wrote back in March, like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, the McWilliam portrait is all about the eyes.

But in perhaps the greatest art scandal since the Paris Salon refused Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Perrin’s portrait of McWilliam was not selected as an Archibald finalist by the trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW.

It was the latest example of the Archibald judge’s peculiar preference for artist self-portraits, surely a breach of the spirit of Bulletin editor J.F. Archibald’s bequest to paint “some man or woman distinguished in art, letters, science or politics”.

In our opinion, the gallery’s trustees — who are led by its supremely well-connected president David Gonski (one of McWilliam and his good friend Malcolm Turnbull’s near neighbours in Point Piper) and include billionaire Gretel Packer and former Virgin chief John Borghetti — need to return the prize to its first principles.

Surely McWilliam’s exuberant emails were enough to qualify him in the “letters” category.