Elder Wing of Australian Art: Audio Described Tour
Work 10 of 15

As the daughter of a famous painter, Nora Heysen sought to ensure that her career as an artist was neither limited nor advanced by her father’s reputation. She was determined to find her own path. Whereas her father Hans Heysen is renowned for his outdoor paintings – of epic landscapes and his almost heroic treatment of the Australian gum tree – Nora Heysen distinguished herself both as a painter of nature indoors – of still-lifes and flowers – and as a highly accomplished portraitist. In 1938 she became the first woman to win Australia’s most prestigious award for portrait painting, the Archibald Prize. Five years later, she was the first woman to be appointed as an official Australian war artist, documenting the role of women in the armed forces during the Second World War.

Nora Heysen had shown immense artistic talent as a child growing up near Hahndorf in the Adelaide Hills, and at the age of fourteen she enrolled at the North Adelaide School of Fine Arts. By the time she was twenty-two, her work was already in the collections of three state art museums.

Ruth, painted in 1933, is one of those works. It demonstrates Heysen’s command of portraiture early in her career. With its pure colouration and sharply outlined forms, it conveys Heysen’s acute observation of the features and characters of her subjects.

In Ruth, Heysen captures the agrarian simplicity of her young subject, yet also transforms her into something more classical. Heysen’s full-length sketches for this work show that the sitter originally wore farm-worker’s overalls, but these disappear when she is framed here in a half-length image. Instead, the completed work – of a young woman in a blouse with a simple neckline, her arms lightly folded, set against a clear blue sky and an Italianate rendering of the Adelaide Hills – pays homage to the portraiture of the Italian Renaissance master Raphael. Under Heysen’s brush, the South Australian farm girl resembles a Florentine Madonna.

Ruth by Australian artist Nora Heysen is a portrait format oil painting on canvas. Painted in 1933 in Hahndorf, South Australia it is 81.5cm high and 64.2cm wide.

A portrait, Ruth, is a young woman in her upper teens or early twenties. Depicted from the hips up facing the viewer, she stands with her strong arms loosely folded, her left side slightly forward. She wears a simple short-sleeved black dress, with a scooped circular neckline that shows her neck and collarbone.

Ruth’s arms and face are a healthy pink, her pale white skin darkened by the sun. She has a rounded forehead, a sloping nose and a rounded jawline with a cleft chin. She has large, almost oversized, blue-grey eyes with dark eye lashes and prominent dark eyebrows. Her red lips are full but unsmiling.

Her brown hair, parted on the left, is pulled away from her face and behind each ear into two thick plaits. Her left plait falls in front of her left shoulder, the other falls behind her right shoulder. A short curling length of hair has escaped, falling against her cheek just in front of her left ear.

Ruth’s face, hair, neck and arms are created with blended paint-strokes, for her skin is smooth and her features detailed. Her black dress is painted with larger layered criss-crossed brush strokes that give the appearance of slight folds in the cloth.

Behind Ruth, in the lower half of the painting, are greens, greys and browns. The paint has been applied irregularly, almost roughly, to represent the farming landscape where the painting was created, Hahndorf in the Adelaide Hills.

In the lower left is a pond surrounded by trees and crops. Diagonal splotches of brown and green paint are ploughed fields in the lower right. Paler green rounded shapes either side of Ruth are distant grassy paddocks, trees, hills and valleys.

A cloudless sky is behind Ruth’s head and shoulders in the upper half of the painting. Very pale blue at the horizon, the sky darkens towards the top.

The painting is signed and dated in the bottom right corner, ‘NORA HEYSEN. 1933’.