Ken Rosewall AM MBE (b. 1934), champion tennis player, won the Australian Open in 1953 and again nineteen years later in 1972 (he remains both the youngest, and oldest, person to win the title). Between 1953 and 1972 Rosewall won four Australian, two French and two US singles championship titles. Coached in Sydney by Harry Hopman, and sardonically nicknamed 'Muscles' on account of his slight stature, he won his first major titles, the Australian and French singles, in 1953 at the age of eighteen. At the close of the 1977 season, aged forty-three, he was still ranked number twelve in the game. Rosewall turned professional in 1957 and became the second player (after Rod Laver) to earn more than a million dollars from tennis, but the ban on professionals from 1957 to 1967 precluded his participation in many Grand Slam events. Asked about tennis in 1977 he said 'it's something I enjoy and find I still do well'. Rosewall was inducted into the international Tennis Hall of Fame in 1980, and its Australian counterpart in 1995.
Ireland-born Sinead Davies studied at the Byam Shaw School in London and moved to Sydney in 1983. Davies is a three-time finalist in the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize and has been in the Portia Geach Memorial Award six times. Hers is the first painted portrait of Ken Rosewall.
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Gift of the artist 2010
© Sinead Davies/Copyright Agency, 2023
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