Judith Wright (1915-2000) was a poet, literary critic, editor, and fiction writer, as well as an active and influential conservationist and Aboriginal rights advocate. Her poems accordingly reflect 'the love of the land we have invaded and the guilt of the invasion'. Wright met and married the journalist, playwright and bushman Jack McKinney in the 1940s, and the couple became good friends with Charles and Barbara Blackman. Meredith McKinney (b. 1950) was to become a scholar of Japanese and a literary translator. Her collaborative translations of her mother's works have been published in Australia and Japan. This work recalls a day when the Blackman and Wright/ McKinney families, both to assume great cultural significance to Australia, happily picnicked at Cedar Creek near Tamborine in the winter of 1955. It was in private collections for more than forty years before Barbara Blackman heard it was for sale through a Melbourne gallery. She purchased the painting of her 'good dear beloved long friend' especially for the National Portrait Gallery, which she has long championed. In May 2000 the two women were present at a function in the gallery to celebrate the acquisition of the work and Wright's 85th birthday. Wright died just a few weeks later.
Charles Blackman OBE (1928-2018), artist, studied at East Sydney Technical College before moving to Melbourne, where he came to the attention of art patron John Reid. With Reid's support, he began to produce his signature series of images, incorporating schoolgirls with flowers and Alice in Wonderland figures and motifs. He was a signatory to the Antipodean Manifesto (loosely, a defence of figuration against abstraction) in the early 1950s. After he won the Helena Rubinstein Scholarship in 1960, his work was shown in the important Whitechapel and Tate exhibitions in London in 1961-1962. Exhibiting prolifically throughout his career, over the 1970s he produced softer images of cats and gardens. In the early 1990s, a period during which he revisited themes of his early work, a Blackman retrospective show toured nationally. Renowned especially for his drawing, Blackman is represented in the National Gallery of Australia and all state galleries.
Gift of Barbara Blackman 2000. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program.
© Charles Blackman/Copyright Agency, 2024
The Family was painted by Charles Blackman around 1955. It is oil on board and measures about one metre high by 1.4 metres wide in its frame. The frame is narrow light wood with a stepped surface. This dark shadowy portrait shows the heads and shoulders of, in a row from the left: Jack McKinney, Judith Wright, and their daughter Meredith McKinney. They are painted in a distinctive stylised manner.
The background is divided horizontally; the top fifth is painted pale cream and the lower part, behind the figures, is a mixture of dark browns and greys. The focus is on the figures’ faces and hats.
Jack, on the left, wears a hat with a square box-like crown in washed-out blue above a round reddish brim. His face is blue and almost rectangular. His eyes are on a slant. The eye on our left is lower and larger than the other. Below a dark brow, it is an elongated green almond with a large black iris. The eye on the right is higher on the face, set beneath the hat brim; blue with a black iris and a flash of orange highlighting the eyelid. The straight edges of Jack’s nose run parallel to his cheek. His ear on the far left of the portrait is a loop of apricot and blue with a dark centre. Just below the ear, a hand rests on Jack’s shoulder. The lower part of his face and neck is obscured by deep shadow, only interrupted by a sprig of blue-green foliage.
The central figure, Judith, appears shorter than Jack. Her hat with its much flatter rounded crown and narrow brim does not stand as tall as his. The hat is blue and white striped with dashes of red, orange, and green. Judith’s eyes sit in shade under its brim. They are wide-spaced, blue, with pointed inner corners. Their black irises are positioned towards their rounded outer ends. Just beneath Judith’s eyes, a bunch of flowers of different shapes, sizes, and bright colours, hides the half of her face to our left. On the right her face is painted with smudges of white and pink. A pale haze on either side of her face suggests hair.
Between Judith and Meredith, on our far right, is another brightly coloured bouquet. This seems to be held by one of the figures' hands at the very bottom edge of the portrait.
Meredith, on the far right, is smaller and shorter than her parents. Her hat has a square crown with a dome fitted within it sitting on a narrow brim. The hat is patterned with blue, white, yellow, and orange flowers. Beneath the hat is a dark band of shadow concealing Meredith’s eyes. Her face, with grey and white skin, tapers with straight lines to a square chin. Her nose is triangular with a narrow bridge widening out to large, rounded nostrils. Meredith’s lips are small and closed, crimson, outlined with black. On either side of her face is an irregular elongated blue-grey shape, possibly representing hair. In front of her chest is a mass of yellow and blue swirls. Meredith wears a white pointed collar and a floral-patterned top with yellow highlighting her shoulder on the far right of the portrait.
Audio description written and voiced by Lucie Shawcross, 2021
Barbara Blackman AO (3 portraits)
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Dr. Sarah Engledow explores the context surrounding Charles Blackman's portrait of Judith Wright, Jack McKinney and their daughter Meredith.
Meredith McKinney, subject of Charles Blackman's 'The Family', recounts memories from her childhood and the creation of the portrait.
