Nora Heysen AM

Nora Heysen commenced her formal training as an artist at Adelaide’s establishment North Adelaide School of Fine Arts, proving to be a talented still life and portrait painter. Self-funded by sales from a 1933 solo exhibition at the Royal South Australian Society of Arts, she headed for London in 1934 where she stayed until 1937. On her return to Australia, Heysen settled in Sydney although never really identifying with the contemporary art movements of this time. She exhibited with   the Sydney Society of Artists. Nora Heysen was the first woman to win the Archibald Prize in 1939 and the first woman to take up the post of official war artist in 1943 . Heysen was collected by state institutions as early as 1932 by the Art Gallery of New South Wales and is now in numerous important collections. Like many women artists, Nora Heysen straddled the conflict of professional artist and the responsibilities of being a wife and stepmother into the 1950s and 60s. She was also somewhat overshadowed by her famous father, the artist Sir Hans Heysen. Nora Heysen is among the many women artists now being celebrated with a retrospective of her work held at the National Library of Australia in 2000 and the 2019 exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Hans and Nora Heysen: Two Generations of Australian Art.