William DOBELL   1899  - 1970

When Dobell returned to Sydney in 1939, after ten years abroad, his genre and portrait painting added a new dimension to Australian painting. The assimilation of varied European influences - Rembrandt, Daumier, Hogarth and Renoir - appealed to all schools. Initially attracting a conservative following, Dobell was later claimed as the figurehead of the Sydney Modernist wartime movement. His appointment as an official war artist provided a succession of portrait subjects that gave full scope to his talents. His best portraits resulted from this wartime period of inspiration. In 1944 he won the Archibald Prize with a portrait of his colleague, Joshua Smith. The award gained Dobell national notoriety but inhibited work he produced afterwards because of the disproportionate publicity attached to it. In 1948 Dobell won the Archibald and Wynne prizes simultaneously. After recovering from a period of extremely poor health in the mid-1950s, Dobell celebrated in 1959 with a third successful Archibald painting, a portrait of his surgeon Dr Edward McMahon. Dobell was commissioned for many prestigious portraits after this, including a Time magazine cover portrait of Prime Minister Robert Menzies in 1960. The crowning touch to Dobell’s career was a large retrospective exhibition at the Australian Gallery of NSW in 1964.

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