painter and graphic artist. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, holds
William Dobell was born on 24 September 1899 at Cooks Hill in Newcastle, the sixth and youngest child of Robert Dobell, a bricklayer,and his wife Margaret Emma Wrightson. At Cooks Hill Commercial Public School his teacher, John Walker, noticed his talent for drawing and encouraged him. By 1916 he was working as a technical draughtsman for a local architect, Wallace Lintott Porter.
In 1924 he moved to Sydney where he worked for the pressed metal manufacturers’ Wunderlich, while undertaking evening classes at the Sydney Art School under Henry Gibbons. His precocious talent for drawing soon attracted attention. When he was awarded the NSW Travelling Art Scholarship in 1929, both Wunderlich and the Committee for the Artists’ Ball supplemented the funds as they knew this student did not have a wealthy family to subsidise his international travel.
He travelled to London and enrolled in the Slade School in late 1929. In 1930 he was awarded first prize for a painted nude study by a student. Financially, the London years were hard for Dobell as the Travelling Art Scholarship only had funds for two years, and he moved from a series of basement and attic rooms in a series of boarding houses.
In order to survive the bleak years of the Great Depression Dobell drew illustrations for magazines and advertising agencies. Mary Eagle records that Dobell told his biographer James Gleeson 'that the editors of illustrated magazines only wanted corny jokes about sailors and pretty women’. She notes a drawing in cartoon style in one of his sketchbooks (c.1933, National Gallery of Australia [NGA]) showing a Salvation Army officer peering through a bathroom keyhole and saying to a fellow officer, 'Quick Joey! Play the National Anthem!’ He also designed posters, e.g. Orient Line to Australia (NGA).
A fellow student, Nancy Kilgour (married to Jack Noel Kilgour) noted in her diary how awkwardly Dobell behaved in the presence of women. He had an acutely cynical observant eye, and his small swift paintings of these years effectively captured the follies and the pretentions of London life with paintings such as Mrs South Kensington (1937 AGNSW) and The Dead Landlord (1936) a painting which inspired Patrick White to write The Ham Funeral. He could also paint gently romantic studies such as The Boy at the Basin (1932 AGNSW) and his sensuous study The Sleeping Greek (1936 AGNSW). In cosmopolitan London, in the company of openly gay friends like Donald Friend, Dobell could relax somewhat about his sexuality, and his drawings of the late 1930s are more frank in their admiration of the male body than previous work. At the beginning of 1939, on hearing that his father was ill, he began the long journey home, but decided to travel home via Paris. Robert Dobell died in February 1939, before his son could return.
As his paintings had been hung bq). On the Linebq). at the Royal Academy, and as he had easily mastered the ironic yet technically adept academic style of the Slade tradition, Dobell was received with some enthusiasm in Sydney. He was honoured with a survey exhibition at the National Art Gallery of NSW and when war broke out was able to become one of the group of artists painting camouflage. Homosexuality was illegal for all of Dobell’s lifetime and in Sydney he was careful to remain both in the closet, and in the background at any social meeting.
This attempt at personal camouflage was destroyed in 1944 when he was awarded the Archibald Prize for the portrait of fellow artist, Joshua Smith. Smith had been one of three other men sharing a tent with Dobell in Army service, but this detail did not stop the Daily Mirror from publishing a headline that was designed to imply a greater intimacy. The painting was under attack partly because in awarding the prize to Dobell, who was associated with the Society of Artists, the Trustees had broken a time-honoured unwritten agreement that it was the turn of a Royal Art Society painter to win. The fact that this was a modernist portrait by an artist only recently returned from London compounded the insult. The Trustees awarded the prize to Dobell because there were at this time fewer votes aligned with the Royal Art Society. Their president, William Lister Lister, had died suddenly on 6 November 1943 and the Minister for Education, Clive Evatt, had not replaced him. The Minister had two unaligned nominees on the board. One of these was the former State Librarian and deputy-director of the Department of War Organisation of Industry in New South Wales, W.H. Ifould. The other, appointed in March 1943, was his sister-in-law Mary Alice Evatt, the first woman to join the board. She was a vocal advocate of modern art and not inclined to support conservative artists with a sense of entitlement.
Two unsuccessful artists who were also members of the Royal Art Society, Mary Edwards and Joseph Wolinski, sued the Trustees of the National Art Gallery of NSW, claiming that Dobell’s portrait of Smith was bq). not a portrait but a caricature bq)..
It was hard for the Trustees to openly defend the case, as those associated with the Royal Art Society were happily providing information to Howard Ashton who was the art critic of the Sydney Sun, as well as the plaintiffs. Tensions on the Trustees were compounded when in April 1944, some eight months before the case was heard, Clive Evatt appointed Dobell to the Board as a replacement for the Royal Art Society’s Lister Lister.
Despite the attacks and innuendo in the media, support came from surprising sources. Lionel Lindsay, a fierce anti-modernist who nevertheless saw merit in Dobell’s work, secretly provided detailed briefing notes to the defence barristers. His briefing notes included the information that the principal witness for the plaintiffs, J.S. MacDonald, had written his attack on the portrait of Joshua Smith without seeing it. This formed the basis of the rigorous cross examination of MacDonald, and damaged the credibility of the plaintiffs. Dobell, who was called as a witness, spoke well to defend his practice as an artist and as a painter of portraits. As colourful as the Dobell Archibald case was (and it certainly provided a useful distraction from World War II), the plaintiffs attack on modern art was doomed. Justice Roper ruled that the only question that could lawfully decided by the court was the competence of the Trustees to make a decision to award the prize, and therefore the case was dismissed.
Even though he had not been on trial, Dobell was traumatised by both the courtroom experience, and the media attention. He retreated to his sister’s house at Wangi Wangi on Lake Macquarie. Oddly enough the ordeal by media had made Dobell a popular figure. His paintings never fully recovered the satirical edge of his earlier studies, but their sweetness made them greatly admired as subjects for reproduction in Womens’ Weekly and other magazines. He was awarded the 1948 Archibald Prize for his portrait of fellow artist Margaret Olley, and the Wynne for Storm approaching Wangi.He visited New Guinea as the guest of Sir Edward Hallstrom and made many delightful small oil sketches of a more exotic life, as well as painting society portraits. He painted the aged poet Dame Mary Gilmore, and eight portraits of the beautician Helena Rubenstein. His most famous commission was of the Prime Minister, Robert Gordon Menzies, a commission for Time magazine. Neither the subject nor the artist had much sympathy for each other, and both placed this on the public record. He was knighted in 1966, a year after Menzies’ retirement.
Dobell died at Wangi Wangi of congestive heart failure, on 13 May 1970 and directed that his estate be used to establish the Sir William Dobell Art Foundation.
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
Joanna Mendelssohn
- Date written:
- 1996
- Last updated:
- 2011
