Jill Neville (1932–1997), writer and critic, grew up in Sydney and attended a Blue Mountains boarding school. By the age of seventeen she was something of a muse to Sydney bohemians, but she left for London in the early 1950s, initially living on a Chelsea houseboat. When her brother Richard Neville arrived in London, she introduced him to people who helped launch the English incarnation of his magazine Oz, the first issues of which were published from her Bayswater home. In 1966 she published her first novel, Fall-Girl, which drew on her tumultuous relationships with the poets Peter Porter and Robert Lowell. Moving to Paris the following year, she went on to write six more novels, the last three of which, Last Ferry To Manly, Swimming the Channel and The Day We Cut the Lavender, explored the experience of individuals torn between Europe and Australia. Through the 1980s and early 1990s she was a regular reviewer for the Independent, the Times Literary Supplement, the Observer, London Magazine and the Australian.
A well-known portraitist, Reginald Gray began this portrait soon after he met Neville in Paris in 1967. They lost touch before it was completed, but he finished the canvas as a tribute to Neville when he heard the news of her death in 1997.
Gift of the artist 2002
© Reginald Gray
Reginald Gray (1 portrait)
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Well behaved women seldom make history, as the saying goes, and the National Portrait Gallery, consequently, is full of awesome Australian women who refused to conform to narrow ideas about their place and their worth.
Eye to Eye is a summer Portrait Gallery Collection remix arranged by degree of eye contact – from turned away with eyes closed all the way through to right-back-at-you – as we explore artists’ and subjects’ choices around the direction of the gaze.
