When the painter Nora Heysen won the Archibald Prize in 1938 she became both the first woman artist and the youngest person to win the famed prize. While she had encouragement at home — her father, the painter Hans Heysen, exclaimed “We have another artist in the family!” upon seeing her work — not everyone shared the progressive sentiment. In response to Heysen’s win, the artist, teacher and theorist Max Meldrum was quoted as saying, "If I were a woman, I would certainly prefer raising a healthy family to a career in art."

It’s a mark of how far women in the arts in Australia have come that the Art Gallery of New South Wales is preparing for the announcement of the winners of the 2025 Archibald Wynne and Sulman prizes under the new leadership of Maud Page, the first female director in the institution's 154 year history. The exhibition, curated by Beatrice Gralton, also marks the first time that there are more women artist finalists than men across all three categories.

“It's an incredible statistic, but the reason that I love it is that the gallery has no part in it,” Page tells me. “It's not because there's an agenda, and it's not because the trustees or anyone else was ticking boxes, and I do love that it's happened naturally. The strength of women artists is evident. And that's what's on the walls.”

“It has never been an easy path for women in the art world, and I don't think 2025 is an exception to that,” Gralton tells me. “It's a great year. It's great that this year there are more works by female artists than male artists in the shows. When you think about it, about 70% of our art school graduates are women. So what happens in that period between young artists graduating and being included in exhibitions and prizes? What are the commercial gallery options or the career pathways available to our young practitioners? As we begin to see more women represented by galleries, we also begin to see their work being entered into major prizes and awards. And there's a correlation there. It's great to see a balance in the numbers, but this needs to become the norm, not the exception.”

Women artists have only won the Archibald Prize 12 times in the 103 years since the annual portrait prize was established. When Heysen won her prize almost a century ago she also became the first Archibald winner to be asked what her favourite recipes were. And while Hungarian goulash, duck with olive sauce and Chilean stuffed green peppers sound delicious, what they are cooking at home is not the question we have chosen to ask Page, Gralton and former Archibald Prize winners Yvette Coppersmith, Julia Gutman and Laura Jones. In honour of the paths laid by those who came before them, these five women shared an Archibald Prize portrait that holds personal significance to them.

Maud Page, Director Art Gallery of New South Wales

Page, who worked in major public art galleries in Australia and internationally for over two decades, joined the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2017 as deputy director and director of collections. She remembers walking into the gallery and being struck by the self portrait by Pitjantjatjara artist Tjungkara Ken.

“This painting is about a First Nations artist representing herself as part of the land through an ancestral story, and shows the way an artist can completely turn portraiture on its head,” Page says. “The image was almost impossible to read. You know it's the Seven Sisters so you try to see if you can see seven stars in it, and you look at all the circular motifs in the painting, and there are way more than seven. There was no way to read this painting with the cues we get from traditional portraiture — is there feeling in the painting? Is there expression? Is there a sadness emanating from that portrait? Perhaps. What is most prominent is how a person can be so strongly aligned, or so of the earth, so of history. The artist gave us a beautiful quote. She said, “I hold my father’s story, I hold my mother’s story… [it] doesn’t come out of paper or out of a book. It’s coming out of the ground here.”

Beatrice Gralton, Curator Archibald Wynne and Sulman Prizes 2025

As the curator of this year’s exhibition Gralton has spent a lot of time with the current crop of works and says that when Fragar’s portrait of Melbourne artist Justene Williams came into the packing room it stopped her in her tracks. “It took my breath away,” she says. “I was so excited to see it. These are two female artists that I admire so much. It's a work of scale, and it's completely worthy of that scale. Julie has captured Justene's spirit as an artist, her brilliance, her limitless imagination. There's also a little picture in there of Justene's young daughter looking up at her mum in admiration and bewilderment. The fact that it’s a great portrait of a female artist by a great woman artist, to me, is hugely exciting. I was so happy to meet that work and see it come in.”

Laura Jones, Archibald Prize winner 2024

A year on from her win, artist Laura Jones is still reflecting on the moment she received the news that her portrait of writer and activist Tim Winton had won the prestigious prize. “Sometimes I'll be driving along, and I’ll be like, ‘Did that really happen?’ It's extremely moving to know that you are one of the few women to have won it, and when that hits home it's just incredible. I will always be grateful for it.”

Jones cites Fiona Lowry's portrait of Penelope Seidler, which won the portrait prize in 2014, as a source of inspiration. “I was just starting out as an artist, and her [Fiona Lowry’s] win was such an influence and an impact on young women artists. It put it in the present that it was really a possibility to pursue an art career. I grew up in a house that my dad designed, and I love architecture. And so the subject of Penelope Seidler really inspired me too. It’s exactly 10 years between our wins so to think about what I did in that period of 10 years is a really direct example of how women can inspire women.”

Yvette Coppersmith, Archibald Prize winner 2018

Yvette Coppersmith slept in late the morning she received the call telling her that she was the 10th woman to win the Archibald Prize. “I was lying in bed thinking, ‘Oh I should get up…’ And when I did, I walked across the room, turned my phone on and it rang immediately. Michael Brand’s voice was on the other line and he was like, ‘I've been calling for 20 minutes!’”

She describes the experience as surreal. “I don't really know how to describe it, other than you suddenly have to expand your mind to a point that you've never let it go to before. I remember going for a walk through Potts Point and wondering if people could tell, just by looking at me, that something massive and life altering had just happened to me.”

Coppersmith chose Grace Crowley’s portrait of the artist’s cousin Gwen Ridley as the painting that has most influenced her. “There's something incredibly elegant and feminine about her stylisation of form. Grace Crowley was one of the first artists to make pure abstraction in Australia. She was a pioneer.”

When you look at the two artists’ winning portraits you can see the thread that connects them. Coppersmith says that she didn’t even realise that she chose the exact same hairstyle for herself as Crowley’s subject. “The connection is like inheriting a visual language. There’s an inheritance like that you can have from artists to artists, even if you've never met them. And it's so personal, and so emotional. I guess that's her legacy — she didn't have children, she chose not to marry and instead pursue art. Art was her soulmate. She has no idea how her art would go on to influence the future generations of Australian artists.”

Julia Gutman, Archibald Prize winner 2023

Sydney textile artist Julia Gutman remembers her grandmother taking her to the Archibald Prize when she was a child and sees the annual exhibition as a way for the general public to be introduced to new Australian artists. “It was the first time I saw a lot of Australian artists,” she tells me. “You're probably not going to be clued into what's happening in the Australian art world if you're not in it. So it does really offer that engagement into what's happening locally to the general public. And I think that's really important.”

Gutman says she chose Cummings’ portrait of fellow painter and teacher Jean Appleton because she was “drawn to the line and the freedom within the painting. It’s about the sense of character and the feeling of the person, rather than trying to capture a likeness, which is something I really care about as well. I'm captivated by the feeling of it, rather than the focus on likeness which I can find quite boring. It’s very emotive, you get a sense of what it might feel like to talk to the subject.”