Sydney-based painter Ralph Heimans AM (b. 1970) is one of the world's foremost contemporary portraitists, having created a body of work that has expanded and redefined the possibilities of what is sometimes perceived as an inflexibly traditional genre. Born in Sydney, Heimans has said his 'first memories are of drawing constantly'. At seventeen he won the National Art Award, which enabled his travel to schools in Europe. After returning home, Heimans completed an undergraduate degree in Fine Arts and Pure Mathematics at the University of Sydney, studied at the Julian Ashton Art School, and also received extensive private tuition in traditional European painting techniques. Gloves Off (1996), a portrait of Tom Uren, and Radical Restraint (1998), his painting of the Hon. Justice Michael Kirby AC CMG – both subsequently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery – initiated what has become a consistent and defining feature of Heimans' work: the practice of integrating portraiture and narrative in complex compositions underpinned by consummate draughtsmanship and an ability to transform paint into light. 'I'm not interested in … inserting my sitters into a standard template', Heimans says. 'My approach is to reverse that and immerse myself in the world of the subject, and draw inspiration from that.' Commissioned to create a work for the European Court in Luxembourg, Heimans left Australia in the late 1990s, living in Paris and then London and gradually securing portrait commissions, private, corporate and public, from clients worldwide.
In 2006, he was commissioned by the Danish Museum of National History at Frederiksborg to create the first official portrait of Tasmanian-born Crown Princess Mary of Denmark; and in 2012, he was the only artist granted a sitting with Queen Elizabeth II in her Diamond Jubilee year. The resulting portrait – The Coronation Theatre: Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II – shows the late monarch standing at the centre of the Cosmati pavement in Westminster Abbey, where she had been crowned sixty years previously. Heimans' most ambitious work to date, the portrait was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery in 2012 and was then acquired by Westminster Abbey, where it remains the centrepiece of the Diamond Jubilee Galleries, opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 2018. He subsequently created portraits of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh (2017), the Earl and Countess of Wessex (2016), and of the Prince of Wales, now King Charles III (2018). In 2014 he was commissioned to paint the official portrait of former governor-general Dame Quentin Bryce AD CVO for the Historic Memorials Collection, Parliament House; and his portrait of HRH Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark, a companion to his earlier portrait of Princess Mary, was commissioned to celebrate the sitter's 50th birthday in 2018. That year, the Danish Museum of National History mounted a retrospective of his work. Heimans' paintings and drawings are held in private collections internationally and in public collections such as those of the National Portrait Galleries in Canberra and Washington DC, the Royal Collection Trust, and the European Court in Luxembourg. He was named a Member of the Order of Australia in 2014 for his services to portraiture.
