Nora Heysen

Nora Heysen, (11 January 1911 – 30 December 2003) was an Australian artist, the first woman to win the Archibald Prize in 1938 for portraiture and the first Australian woman appointed as an official war artist.

Early years Heysen was born on 11 January 1911 in Hahndorf, South Australia, Australia, as the fourth child of landscape painter Hans Heysen and his wife Selma Heysen . She and was raised at The Cedars in Hahndorf in the Adelaide Hills. Heysen and her siblings were taught painting at home by the artist and teacher Mary Anstie Overbury.

Early career In 1930, Heysen produced 24 pen, ink and wash drawings to illustrate a collection of legends by Katie Langloh Parker, titled Woggheeguy.

Heysen's first solo exhibition was held in Sydney in 1933. In 1934 she travelled to London with her family, remaining in Europe after they returned home, until 1937 studying and painting at the Central School of Art and Design

Heysen missed her family while living in England, so invited her friend Everton Stokes (Evie), a sculpture student, to share her London flat. Heysen also wrote letters to her father about her studies and paintings she observed while visiting the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery and Tate. There was a controversy involving criticism of her win by painter Max Meldrum.

War artist

On 12 October 1943, Heysen became the first woman to be appointed as an Australian war artist, being granted the honorary rank of captain. As Heysen said in a later interview about her role: "I was commissioned to depict the women's war effort. There was that restriction on what I did. So I was lent around to all the services, the air force, the navy and the army, to depict the women working at everything they did during the war".

During her service Heysen completed over 170 works of art. and lists three of Heysen's favourite recipes along with her strategies for achieving domestic duties and leaving time for painting.

Heysen's works are currently held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the Australian War Memorial, the National Library of Australia, the National Portrait Gallery and several state galleries.

A major retrospective exhibition of the work of daughter and father, Hans and Nora Heysen: Two Generations of Australian Art, was curated by the National Gallery of Victoria and displayed from March–July 2019. Reviewing it, Sydney Morning Herald critic John McDonald described Nora's career as a "fractured, stop-start affair", but that in a "popular rethinking of the Heysen's place in local art history ... Nora's star has risen while her father's has declined." and described her Still Life of quinces (1933) from the same collection as "painted with the precision of an old master."