So I got a wet towel, and there they were handling this wet towel, washing their eyes, begging me to never exhibit it again or anything.' Dobell said the Smiths tried to buy the portrait, offering £300, 'which was tremendous money then'. 'And being a poor housekeeper, I had no handkerchiefs to offer them. William Dobell later relayed to artist and critic James Gleeson how both Joshua and his father were weeping. They stayed all morning, weeping and talking.' 'You have ruined my son,' said old Mr Smith. Smith's father was in tears, torn up by the public's comments about how his son looked in the portrait.īased on what he had heard, the artist and writer Donald Friend wrote in his diary: 'Joshua and his father besieged poor Bill, wept and pleaded for the picture to be destroyed. Smith turned up with his father at Dobell's flat early one morning, before Bill was even out of bed. For once, art was the talk of the nation.Īs that face filled the public eye and fed debate, the man it belonged to became increasingly distressed. The gallery had to extend its opening hours, and then it prolonged the exhibition by a month. Record numbers visited the gallery to see what all the fuss was about. She also offered some medical advice: 'Not a child or an expectant mother should be allowed in the Art Gallery at present.' I couldn't sleep after seeing it the first time.' Mary Edwards declared, 'Grotesquerie has been awarded the prize' and 'it is a Pearl Harbor attack on art'.

Wolinski declared of Dobell's painting, 'If this is meant to set a new standard in art, it will start a revolt. The 'concerned citizens' opposed to Dobell's win included two fellow Archibald entrants, Sydney artists Mary Edwards and Joseph Wolinski. The Melbourne meeting resolved to apply for a court injunction to restrain the gallery trustees from giving Dobell the prize money. Groups of 'concerned citizens' met in Sydney and Melbourne, vowing to challenge the trustees' decision. As William Dobell ruefully joked almost two decades later to interviewer Garth Nettheim, 'I was really an extreme modernist, a madman!' The awarding of the prize to this painting was a poke in the eye to what was accepted as portraiture. Yet to others, this was the ugly face of modern art. The Contemporary Art Society declared it the most important work of art entered in the competition. The question - Is this even a portrait? - gathered pace. When the journalist asked Smith about the portrait, he replied, 'Dear me, I hope I don't look like that. Smith himself looked 'slightly astonished'. 'Joshua was there, and the press was horrified, you know, it was something new, and a lot of people were sympathising with him and his parents were terribly upset about it, and I think these things worked together to change Joshua's feelings about it,' Dorothy Thornhill said.Ī journalist from the Truth noted Smith's father looked at his son, then at the portrait, and shook his head.

Bitter two farm stands nations divides