Irish portraitist Reginald Gray painted many celebrated subjects including Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon, Helena Bonham Carter, Juliette Binoche, Yves Saint Laurent and the Prince of Brunei. He began this portrait soon after he met the Australian writer and critic Jill Neville (1932–1997) in Paris in 1967. They lost touch before it was completed, and he finished the canvas as a tribute to Neville when he heard the news of her death 30 years later.
Neville left Sydney 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 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.
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.
