Julian Meagher was born in Sydney in 1978 and studied part time at the Julian Ashton Art School before undertaking a Bachelor of Medicine/Bachelor of Surgery at the University of New South Wales. While still a medical student, he spent some time in Italy studying portrait painting at the Charles H Cecil Studios, Florence. Meagher has said that it took him a good while to make the leap from practising medicine to working as an artist fulltime, and his first solo exhibitions, consequently, featured works examining the connections between both disciplines. A portrait from his first solo show, Double Exposure: oils on X-ray, was selected for the Salon des Refusés in 2002; and in 2006 his solo exhibitions Dissections and Scanning were presented at galleries in Sydney and Jamshedpur, India. Awarded an Australia Council Emerging Artist Grant for the development of new work in 2008, Meagher was shortlisted for the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in 2009 and the Black Swan Prize in 2010, and was selected for the Salon in 2009, 2010 and 2012. He became an Archibald Prize finalist for the first time in 2014 with his portrait of actor John Waters.
Since then Meagher's paintings have been in contention for the Archibald three times, his subjects being musician Daniel Johns (2015), writer Richard Flanagan (2018), and human rights advocate and former Socceroo Craig Foster (2021). Meagher's landscapes, still lifes and genre paintings have been selected for the Wynne Prize, the Glover Prize, the Metro Art Prize, the Gold Award and the Blake Prize for Religious Art; and his portraits have featured multiple times in the Moran, the Salon des Refusés, and the Shirley Hannan National Portrait Award. Meagher has exhibited in Australia, Asia and the USA, and held more than 25 solo exhibitions since his first in 2002. His work is included in many public collections including those of Artbank; Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery; Bega Valley Regional Gallery; the Australian Catholic University Association; and the Australian War Memorial.
