Robert Lyall Hannaford (also known as Bob Hannaford or Alfie) was born in 1944 in Riverton, South Australia. He was schooled in Riverton, moving to Adelaide at age fifteen to complete the last two years of schooling at Prince Alfred College. His early life was the quintessential 1950s country childhood and he took to drawing and painting in his youth, an adjunct to exploring the family farm and its surrounds. From childhood he collected and drew material of the natural world, seeing it with a more objective eye than most. As a result, he became his school’s “official artist” and won a number of prizes for his art. At ten years of age, he won a national competition for children’s art and painted his first oil landscape at age fourteen. He had no formal art lessons during his schooling, but did learn technical drawing; his original schoolbooks show the detail he was capable of rendering even at this early age.
Early in 1962 Hannaford enrolled in life drawing and sculpture at the South Australian School of Art, but withdrew, concluding that he was not going to gain much from the experience. Instead, he took a job with an advertising agency where he was influenced by Des Hurcombe, a leading commercial illustrator, and Hugo Shaw, who became a leading landscape artist. Together, Hannaford and Shaw sketched en plein air and read art history books to learn how the masters approached subjects.
In 1962 Hannaford boarded at Lincoln College, which was connected to the University of Adelaide and here he explored the subject of still life as well as contributing cartoons to the college magazine and the University’s student newspaper, On Dit. In 1964 Hannaford took a position as a political cartoonist for the Adelaide Advertiser, a post he retained for three years. In 1963 he rented a loft studio in North Adelaide where he painted his first commissioned portraits, also completing a set of self-portraits between 1962 and 1966, which helped him learn how to draw the human figure. In 1965 he had a few inspirational meetings with Hans Heysen at Heysen’s home in the Adelaide Hills. He also met with the artist Ivor Hele who became a friend and long-term influence on Hannaford, providing feedback on his work and encouraging him to look deeply at all details.
In 1967 Hannaford moved to Ballarat to study with Geoffrey Mainwaring and he sat in on life classes there. In 1969 he received the Bale Art Scholarship, which provided living expenses and a house in Kew, Melbourne, with an extensive art library and studio, which Hannaford took as his base until 1973. During this period, he informally studied art theory and history and worked on his technique, receiving a number of portrait commissions and continuing to paint landscapes and figurative works. The scholarship provided the opportunity to travel for study and he visited Canberra and Sydney for various exhibitions. He also spent two months of each year in South Australia, focusing on landscape painting. At the end of the scholarship in 1973 Hannaford had his first solo exhibition at the Hogan Gallery in Melbourne where the range of his subjects – portraits, still life, nature studies and landscapes – were all displayed.
In 1973 Hannaford moved back to Riverton, a place he loved as a child. Inspired by the country, he became a keen birdwatcher, reflected in a number of renditions of bird life. During the next decade, he moved to Adelaide and then to Kangaroo Island, during which time he became a committed conservationist. He continued to work around Riverton and Adelaide until 1980, when he moved into a house in West Hindmarsh, Adelaide. In 1987 he bought a disused farmhouse back in Riverton, which he renovated to provide living arrangements, a studio and a gallery.
Hannaford travelled to India, the UK and Paris in the early 1980s, then Kenya, India, England and Italy in the early 1990s. He became a regular and celebrated portrait artist, receiving around five commissions each year. This allowed him to make a living as an artist and he complemented this practise with drawing and painting across a number of other genres. During this period he held numerous solo exhibitions in Sydney and Adelaide, roughly one every two years. In 1991 his work was included in the Archibald Prize, and he became a regular exhibitor. In some years he had two paintings hung, a number of them being self-portraits. He won the People’s Choice prize in 1992, 1996 and 1998. In 1990 he won the Doug Moran Portrait Prize with his portrait Bill, and in 1998 he won the inaugural Fleurieu Peninsula Landscape Art Prize with the work Mainland from Kangaroo Island.
In February 2006 Hannaford was diagnosed with tongue and throat cancer, possibly linked to his habit of clamping brushes in his mouth while working. By the end of that year he was declared clear of the cancer and threw himself into his work with renewed vigour. The definitive work from this time is his Self Portrait with Tubes, a work showing the naked artist with a feeding tube protruding from his stomach.
Hannaford is a highly commissioned portrait artist, with paintings completed for a number of universities, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Library and Parliament House. He has painted a number of well-known figures such as Prime Ministers Paul Keating and Bob Hawke, and notable Australians such as Robert Dessaix, Max Harris, Lowitja O’Donohue and Deborah Mailman. He has also painted a number of conservationists, including Bob Brown, Tim Flannery and Jack Mundy. One of Hannaford’s commissions was his rendering of the Centenary of Federation Commemorative Sitting of Federal Parliament, Royal Exhibition Building Melbourne, which mirrors Tom Roberts’ 1903 painting Opening of the First Parliament.
- Writers:
- Szekeres, Dr Judy
- Date written:
- 2009
- Last updated:
- 2011
