2023 Annual Appeal

The Gallery thanks you for your donations towards the acquisition of June Dally-Watkins by Judy Cassab. We would be grateful for any support you may like to provide toward the acquisition of future works.

The National Portrait Gallery's ever-growing collection tells the remarkable stories of those who have shaped the nation. The generosity of our supporters, donors and members has assisted the Gallery to expand this rich national collection. This year, the Gallery warmly invites you to help us acquire a work by one of Australia's best loved and most successful portrait painters, Judy Cassab AO CBE. Depicting model, entrepreneur and deportment icon, June Dally-Watkins OAM, this work exemplifies Cassab's distinctive style – one which, by combining tradition with modernity and elegance, led to commissions from fashion icons in Australia and overseas. Uniting two iconic women, the portrait shows artist and sitter at the height of their careers. We hope you will assist us to bring this important portrait into the collection.

June Dally-Watkins OAM (1927–2020), model, deportment icon and entrepreneur, grew up on a property at Watsons Creek in the New England district of New South Wales. As a teenager she was noticed on a Tamworth street by a photographer, who encouraged her to move to Sydney to model. She soon booked catwalk shows for David Jones and contracts for Australian Women's Weekly and Woman's Day. In 1950, she established the June Dally-Watkins School, which has since trained countless students in deportment and etiquette in Sydney and Brisbane. The following year she established Australia's first modelling agency. Dally-Watkins died at the age of 92, leaving a lasting legacy not only on the Australian modelling industry, but on the thousands of students to whom she imparted impeccable manners and a knowledge of etiquette.

Judy Cassab AO CBE (1920–2015) created a distinct record of Australian society from 1950s onwards. Born in Vienna, Cassab studied art in Prague and Budapest before adopting false papers and 'going underground' to escape the persecution of Hungarian Jews. After the war, she and her husband reunited and emigrated to Australia in 1951. Within months of arriving in Sydney, she was commissioned by Sir Charles Lloyd Jones to paint a portrait of his wife. In 1960, she won the Archibald Prize for her portrait of her friend, Stanislaus Rapotec; and in 1967, won it again with her painting of artist Margo Lewers. Cassab's work sought to navigate the tension between figuration and abstraction perfecting an expressionist style that captured the subjects' likeness and the spirit of the era.

Donors