WILLIAM DARGIE Australian, 1912-2003

Painted in New Guinea shortly before the Battle of Shaggy Ridge in 1943 preparatory to a portrait intended for MacArthur's library; returned to Australia with the artist's possessions in 1946 at the completion of his service as Official War Artist; and retained in his collection until 1978 when he gave it to the present owner, a close personal friend who, coincidentally, had served in the US Army and was also named Douglas

Private collection, Victoria

General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) was the commanding general of US forces in the Far East when Japanese forces swept across Asia. He was in command of the US and Filipino garrison in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded in December 1941. MacArthur was ordered to escape to Australia four weeks before the Philippines fell and, having famously vowed to return, he arrived in Melbourne in March. Within a month he was appointed supreme commander of Allied Forces in the South-West Pacific Area, and shortly afterwards moved his headquarters to Brisbane in preparation for an offensive to regain Rabaul.

MacArthur was warmly welcomed in Australia and established a close relationship with the Prime Minister, John Curtin. As D. M. Horner observes in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, 'In placing the Australian forces under MacArthur, the Federal government surrendered a large measure of sovereignty, but, considering Australia’s limited strength and the magnitude of the Japanese threat, there was no real alternative’. MacArthur went to Port Moresby for the final stages of the Papuan campaign. William Dargie, then serving in New Guinea as an official Australian war artist, told the present owner of this portrait that he painted it from life not long before the Battle of Shaggy Ridge in 1943. Curtin had suggested that a portrait might be given to the General for his library – but nothing official ever came of the project. Smaller oil sketch portraits and drawings of MacArthur by Dargie are now in the collection of the Australian War Memorial.

On 2 September 1945 MacArthur accepted Japan's surrender aboard the battleship, Missouri, in Tokyo Bay. Dargie had already moved on, sent to Yugoslavia, Greece and Crete after the liberation. Everything about MacArthur was on a ‘grand scale’- his ‘virtues and triumphs and shortcomings’. He was regarded as ‘a brilliant, temperamental egoist; a handsome man’.¹

1. Horner, D. M. in Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 15, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2000, pp. 150-152. Our notes are much indebted to this article and also to the Australian War Memorial’s Australia under Attack, 1942-43. An image painted by Dargie on a lavatory door in Queensland in the 1940s is said to depict MacArthur in the uniform of an American soldier (see The Australian, 15 June 1973, p. 2; The Daily News and Courier Mail, Brisbane, 8 August 1973, now in a private collection).