Portrait of Jerry Ellis

Jeremy Ellis (b. 1927) was Chairman of BHP from 1997 to 1999. Born in England, he was educated in Western Australia and gained a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. After working for ICI in England and Australia he became the manager of planning and development for the BHP-owned Australian Wire Industries in Sydney in 1969. He became manager of the Australian Wire Rope Works, another BHP company, in 1971. He managed a number of operations within BHP before becoming deputy executive general manager of BHP Utah Minerals International in 1989 and a director of BHP in 1991. A former chairman of Sandvik Australia, he has also been chairman of the Pacifica Group and Black Range Minerals, and a director of GroPep and ANZ. A director of the Museum of Contemporary Art from 1996 to 1999, he has also been chancellor of Monash University, and chairman of both the National Occupational Health and Safety Commission and Future Directions International.

Lewis Miller is one of Australia's leading figurative and portraiture artists. He won the 1981 Hugh Ramsay Portrait Prize, and the 2000 Sporting Portrait Prize with a portrait of football legend Ron Barassi. He has been an Archibald finalist fifteen times, and won the prize in 1998 with one of his many portraits of his fellow artist Allan Mitelman. The technique he employed in that painting served him for the painting of Jerry Ellis the following year. 'I worked the paint very thinly using something like a staining technique,' he said, 'and kept a drawn feel with the charcoal lines visible.' In 2003 Miller was appointed by the Australian War Memorial as Australia's official artist to the conflict in Iraq, recording mine clearing undertaken by the Royal Australian Navy in the Persian Gulf and by members of the SAS at Al Qusayr and on the Al Ifziiyah peninsula.

Gift of BHP Billiton 2003. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program.
© Lewis Miller/Copyright Agency, 2022