Sir Ivor Hele (1912–1993) was born in Adelaide and studied art at Prince Alfred College and the South Australian School of Arts and, later, in Paris and Munich. He was Australia's longest-serving official war artist, serving in North Africa, the Middle East and New Guinea during the Second World War and in the Korean War. The Australian War Memorial holds the majority of his works, including intimate landscapes, massive battle-pieces and sensitive drawings in chalk. His postwar paintings were occasionally shown at the Adelaide Advertiser's open-air art exhibitions. Although Hele painted landscapes (mostly of the rocky southern coast of South Australia) and made thousands of erotic paintings and drawings, he was best known as a portrait painter. He was much in demand as an official portraitist and won the Archibald Prize five times between 1951 and 1957, notably with his portrait of Sir Robert Menzies in 1954 and a self-portrait in 1957. Despite his success, he rarely exhibited his works and his last solo exhibition was at the 1970 Adelaide Festival of the Arts. Hele is represented in the National Portrait Gallery's collection with his portraits of Dame Nancy Buttfield, Sir Lloyd Dumas and Claude Charlick.
