Ben Quilty's Archibald Prize-winning Margaret Olley portrait bought by Tweed Regional Gallery

Australia Broadcast Center

15 hours ago

Tweed Regional Gallery's acquisition of Ben Quilty's Archibald Prize-winning portrait of beloved Australian artist Margaret Olley brings with it a sense of homecoming.
Not only are Olley's ashes interred in a garden outside the gallery, inside there is the Margaret Olley Art Centre, which depicts the ordered chaos of her Duxford Street studio in the Sydney suburb of Paddington.
The $600,000 purchase of Quilty's reverential painting, which won the Archibald a few months before Olley passed away in 2011, is a full-circle moment.
Olley was born in Lismore in 1923 and moved to Queensland soon after, but she always maintained a connection to the New South Wales North Coast, according to her friend, benefactor, art gallery owner and executor of her will, Philip Bacon.
"Sometimes when a museum or art gallery acquires something you think, 'Oh, that's where it belongs' and that's absolutely the fact with this picture," he said.
Mr Bacon said Olley "loved" the Tweed Regional Gallery and would often wax lyrical about the region as the pair drove from his home in Brisbane to visit it.
"We'd drive down to the Tweed and when she would get to that great run along the river, where all the cane fields are on the left, and the river on the right, she would wind the window down and just say, 'I'm home,'" he said.
"She loved the green, because it's always green down there and it was her favourite colour.
As one of the co-trustees of the Margaret Olley Art Trust Mr Bacon had much to do with the purchase of the portrait.
The trust tipped in $100,000 and Mr Bacon, who personally contributed $25,000, "rang a lot of people" for donations.
"It is the highest price ever paid for a Ben Quilty," he said.
The painting was on long-term loan to the Art Gallery of NSW after it won the Archibald and also spent some time at Quilty's home in Bowral in the NSW Southern Highlands.
Then Quilty decided it needed to be on a wall so "people could see it" and the Tweed gallery announced its crowd-funding campaign to buy the painting in November last year.
Gallery Director Ingrid Hedgcock said Quilty had always been "100 per cent" onboard.
"It went to his home for some time, but then he realised it wasn't the right place for it," she said.
The portrait will become the jewel of the collection on display at the Margaret Olley Art Centre, which opened in 2014.
"At the heart of [the centre] is the recreation of her extraordinary home studio, and I have always thought of that home studio as a portrait of her because it has all of these narratives and objects that hold stories about her incredible life and her career," Ms Hedgcock said.
"And this portrait is really known across Australia from the Archibald win in 2011, so bringing together Ben's great portrait and the home studio recreation, it just makes sense."
The portrait will form the centrepiece of Painting Life: Margaret Olley and Works from the Collection, on display at the Margaret Olley Art Centre from June 15 until August 31.
Quilty will attend the opening tonight, which is sold out.
Included in this exhibition – and on public display for the first time – are 11 still-life paintings by Quilty.
The colour-rich works depict flora from the artist's garden arranged in cut-glass vases and a ceramic vessel that were gifts from Olley.
"They are still-life paintings that have vessels in them that Margaret gave him years ago from her own collection," Ms Hedgcock said.
"And with that, he has coupled flowers that he has grown from his own garden, so there is this iconic portrait looking across at these still-life paintings."