Portia Geach Memorial Award, portraiture by Australian female artists

Influential art critic, John McDonald, must have had tongue firmly in cheek when he questioned whether the 2023 Portia Geach Memorial Award at the S. H. Ervin Gallery had “gone political,” in his Sydney Morning Herald column last year. McDonald’s concern was in relation to Kate Stevens’ entry The Whistleblower, taking out the prize. David McBride, the high-profile subject of Steven’s diptych, had at the time pleaded guilty of breaching the Defence Act by leaking classified documents detailing alleged Australian war crimes. Yet, was McDonald’s preferred entry, The Drawing Studio (self-portrait) by Yvonne East, any less “political”? East too had a critical point to make at a time when the very notion of woman is contested (in a way that man is not); where equality remains patchy; and women’s rights require ongoing justification and protection.

The prestigious Portia Geach Memorial Award is presented annually by the S. H. Ervin Gallery for a portrait by a woman artist painted from life, of a person distinguished in Art, Letters or the Sciences. The award was established through a bequest from Portia’s sister and companion, (Florence) Kate Geach’s will in 1965.

The bequest is fitting. Portia Swanston Geach (1873-1959) was an Australian painter, etcher, muralist and political activist, spending much of her life advocating for the rights of women in Australia after experiencing differences in opportunity between male and female artists. Her extraordinary political activism is well recorded in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Geach studied design and painting at the Melbourne National Gallery schools (1890 to 1896) before being the first Australian to win a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Arts schools. By the time of her first Australian exhibition in 1901 in Melbourne, she was well trained and travelled, with exhibitions in England, Paris and New York. Whilst progressing her feminist activism Geach continued to paint. In 1926 she exhibited with the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Portraits and figure studies were apparently her speciality. Yet seemingly few of these works survive. Her portrait of federationist and judge, Sir John Quick, c.1910, is held in the National Library of Australia. Other works, mainly her etchings, are scattered across a small number of galleries including the S. H. Ervin Gallery and the National Gallery of Australia, with her whimsical landscape paintings being held primarily in private collections. Geach failed to make the NGA’s Know My Name exhibition series in 2020 and 2021.

Florence Geach’s bequest in honour of her intriguing sister, has not only preserved Portia Geach’s legacy from being lost to history but, has ensured a space for some of the best portraits by Australian women to be exhibited, studied, admired, and rewarded.

S.H. Ervin Gallery is accepting entries to this year’s $30,000 non-acquisitive Portia Geach Memorial Award 2024 until 13 September 2024.

Enter the Portia Geach Memorial Award here.