Betty Churcher AO (1931-2015), gallery director, author, painter and lecturer, was educated in Brisbane before studying art in London. In 1955 she married English artist Roy Churcher and two years later they returned to Brisbane, where throughout the 1960s Betty Churcher worked as a high school art teacher. From 1972 to 1975 she was an art critic for the Australian. A mother of four, at the age of 44 she returned to London to study art history at the Courtauld Institute, and from 1981 to 1987 she taught at Melbourne’s Preston/ Phillip Institute of Technology. In 1987, by which time she had spent some years on the Australia Council and the Visual Arts Board, she was ‘headhunted’ to become director of the Art Gallery of WA, thus becoming the first female director of an Australian state gallery. After three years in Perth she moved to Canberra to succeed James Mollison as Director of the National Gallery of Australia. Having led the institution from 1990 to 1997, from 1998 she was an Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Cross Cultural Research at the ANU, and presented three beguiling television series on art. Her books include Understanding Art (1974), which won a London Times Literary Award, and Notebooks (2011).
Purchased 2013
© Adam Knott
The portrait is of Betty Churcher. It is a colour photograph, an inkjet print on paper, measuring approximately 65 centimetres tall by 55 centimetres wide. It was made by Adam Knott in 2008.
Betty’s smiling face fills the photograph. She looks towards us with chin tilted slightly up in front of a plain pale-grey background. Betty is positioned so close in the portrait the tip of her head is cropped off, along with the sides of her shoulders and arms, and at mid chest.
Betty has grey hair with darker threads and silver highlights running through it. A short fringe parts around either side of her face, the hair cut to gradually follow the curve of her cheeks and jaw where it ends.
The light in the image is directed from above and falls over her forehead, nose, and cheeks, smoothing, and washing out the colour. Her skin is bright and glows with a subtle warm tan. The skin on her forehead is slightly lined above straight tapering eyebrows, dark at their inner points and becoming lighter as they thin at their outer edges.
Laughter lines radiate from the outer corners of her eyes which are almost closed from her smile. The irises appear black with a spark of light reflecting off each.
Betty’s nose is straight and broad at the tip. She has high smooth round cheekbones, accentuated above her broadly smiling mouth. Her red lips are drawn back from two parted rows of teeth, even and white. Her jaw is well defined, the skin creased by vertical lines, and she has a rounded chin.
She wears a black top, the collar positioned high near the back of her neck, coming down into a low ‘v’ in front, revealing a décolletage of mottled tanned skin.
Betty’s hands are in the lower foreground of the photograph, her skin bronzed and speckled. The nails on both hands are of different lengths and unvarnished. She holds her right hand up, almost to her chin, the four fingers in a curved fan. Three fingers of her left hand are lower down, cropped by the bottom edge of the image. Betty loosely holds a pair of glasses, fine streaks of light reflecting off their frames.
Audio description script written and voiced by Lucinda Shawcross
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Betty Churcher AO (1931–2015), gallery director, author, painter and lecturer, was educated in Brisbane before studying art in London.
31 March 2015
The National Portrait Gallery mourns the loss of our colleague and friend Betty Churcher, AO.
