WILLIAM DOBELL Australian, 1899-1970

Mrs J. W. Chambers in 1946

Mrs D. M. Tooth, Moss Vale, by 1964 (label on the reverse)

Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne

Collection of Ted Lustig, Melbourne

William Dobell Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 15 July - 30 August 1964, cat. 103 (label on the reverse)

Spring Exhibition 1978, Recent Acquisitions, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 25 September - 9 October 1978, cat. 108, illus.

Dobell's solid academic training, in Sydney and ten years Europe, found him a following with both conservative and progressive art collectors after his return to Australia in 1939. In the aftermath of the personal and professional trauma of the court case over his Archibald Prize portrait of Joshua Smith in 1943-44, Dobell spent much of his time at Wangi Wangi on the New South Wales central coast. However his first major solo exhibition inaugurated the new David Jones’ Art Gallery in Sydney in August 1944. By 1946 his confidence was returning and in that year, as well as this informal depiction of the young David Chambers, he completed portraits of the economist Professor Lyndhurst F. Giblin (1872-1951); and of Thelma Clune, wife of the author Frank Clune and an important figure in the Sydney art world in her own right. In 1948 he won both the Archibald Prize for portraiture and the Wynne Prize for landscape painting.

David Chambers has a straightforwardness that was later frequently subdued by the artist's pursuit of distortion. The sitter is portrayed with an immediately engaging directness and yet retains an inward thoughtfulness that is perhaps intensified by the dark, translucent backdrop against which he is set.