Brian Dunlop studied at East Sydney Technical College and won the Le Gay Brereton Prize for Drawing while still a student. In the 1960s he travelled and painted in Europe and London before returning to Sydney to teach part time at East Sydney. His first three solo exhibitions were mounted in Sydney from 1963 to 1966, after which he began to exhibit in Adelaide, Brisbane and Melbourne. Through the 1970s and early 1980s he exhibited often at the Macquarie Galleries. He won Canberra’s Civic Permanent Art Award in 1976 and 1977, and the Sulman Prize in 1981. In the early 1980s, after a period as artist in residence at the University of Melbourne, he lived and worked in Tuscany, developing a meticulous style bearing affinities with those of Balthus and Piero della Francesca. Several of his late exhibitions drew on his repeated visits to Turkey and New Zealand. Dunlop painted about ninety portraits on commission, including one of HM Queen Elizabeth II in 1984. Based in Melbourne and Port Fairy from that year, he staged his final exhibition, the first to feature nudes, at Eva Breuer’s Gallery six months before his death. The National Portrait Gallery owns Dunlop’s portraits of Arvi Parbo, Brian Loton, Joseph Brown, Laurence Cox, Noel Foley and David Dridan, and acquired a portrait of Brian Dunlop by Bryan Westwood in 2006.
