Elder Wing of Australian Art: Self-Guided Audio Tour
Work 10 of 15

As the daughter of a famous painter, Nora Heysen sought to ensure that her career as an artist was neither limited nor advanced by her father’s reputation. She was determined to find her own path. Whereas her father Hans Heysen is renowned for his outdoor paintings – of epic landscapes and his almost heroic treatment of the Australian gum tree – Nora Heysen distinguished herself both as a painter of nature indoors – of still-lifes and flowers – and as a highly accomplished portraitist. In 1938 she became the first woman to win Australia’s most prestigious award for portrait painting, the Archibald Prize. Five years later, she was the first woman to be appointed as an official Australian war artist, documenting the role of women in the armed forces during the Second World War.

Nora Heysen had shown immense artistic talent as a child growing up near Hahndorf in the Adelaide Hills, and at the age of fourteen she enrolled at the North Adelaide School of Fine Arts. By the time she was twenty-two, her work was already in the collections of three state art museums.

Ruth, painted in 1933, is one of those works. It demonstrates Heysen’s command of portraiture early in her career. With its pure colouration and sharply outlined forms, it conveys Heysen’s acute observation of the features and characters of her subjects.

In Ruth, Heysen captures the agrarian simplicity of her young subject, yet also transforms her into something more classical. Heysen’s full-length sketches for this work show that the sitter originally wore farm-worker’s overalls, but these disappear when she is framed here in a half-length image. Instead, the completed work – of a young woman in a blouse with a simple neckline, her arms lightly folded, set against a clear blue sky and an Italianate rendering of the Adelaide Hills – pays homage to the portraiture of the Italian Renaissance master Raphael. Under Heysen’s brush, the South Australian farm girl resembles a Florentine Madonna.