School portraits

In the dining hall at Trinity College on the sprawling Melbourne University campus, the student body and university community are exposed to formal portraiture as a lived experience. Encompassing some of Australia’s most significant artists working in that genre, the Trinity College Collection has developed over 150 years into a highly regarded collection of Australian portraiture.

In late 2023 the general public had a rare opportunity to see some of the works in person in the exhibition Face Me: Portraits of a Collegiate Community, curated by Dr Benjamin Thomas, the Rusden Curator of Cultural Collections at Trinity College.

The Trinity collection began when the alumni body engaged the artist Rupert Bunny to paint a portrait of the college’s inaugural warden. The resulting work, Dr. Alexander Leeper (1911), shows the Irish-born Classics scholar resplendent in his voluminous academic robes. Since that initial painting commission, and within the narrow paradigm of portraits depicting wardens, notable alumni and college supporters, the Trinity collection has evolved and expanded, including redressing the balance by commissioning work from more female and First Nations artists.

An unconventional and striking counterpoint to Leeper’s portrait is Rick Amor’s depiction of Professor Robin Sharwood (1974). It shares an emphasis on the ballooning sleeves of the robe, but its sharp lines, opal white background, and somewhat severe aspect – with the sitter’s head painted disproportionately small – signalled an aesthetic shift for the collection. In commissioning this portrait, the College Council relied on the advice of prominent art dealer and collector Dr Joseph Brown AO OBE who recommended Amor, then a recent graduate of Melbourne’s National Gallery School.

Professor Robin Sharwood AM was the college’s fourth warden at a time of considerable change; he oversaw the transition from a male-only residential college to a co-residential one, a change that would come into effect in 1974 after Sharwood’s departure. He ordered the first inventory of the art collection, and was supportive of the artistic heritage at Trinity, commenting, ‘I firmly believed that the College was an institution which should, and could, develop a fine art collection over a period of time’.

Dr Fay Marles AM served from 2001 to 2004 as the 18th Chancellor of the University of Melbourne, the first female to be elected in its 150-year history. She came in to residence at Trinity’s Janet Clarke Hall in 1944 and graduated four years later with a Bachelor of Arts and Diploma of Social Work from the University of Melbourne. When Victorian Premier Sir Rupert Hamer AC KCMG, another Trinity alumnus, established the Equal Opportunity Board in 1977 the role of Equal Opportunity Commissioner went to Marles, who served until 1987. Marles’ determination to change the status quo for women in Australia saw her participation in various other public sector boards and committees across the areas of mental health, accident compensation, patient care and First Nations education.

The hyper-real study by the interdisciplinary artist Juan Ford radiates warmth; the bristling gold-trimmed formal regalia of academic office is undercut by the sitter’s genial smirk and kindly demeanour. In recognition of her dedication to increasing the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander graduates, the Fay Marles Scholarship is offered by the University to First Nations students, or those experiencing compelling circumstances.

The British-born Nicholas Harding was the recipient of the Archibald, Dobell and Wynne prizes during his distinguished career. The lively portrait of a seated William Cowan, AM, (2017) is typical of Harding’s oil paintings with their thickly layered impasto style. Son of Ronald William Cowan, the third warden, the younger Cowan entered the college as a resident student in 1963, studying electrical engineering. After a decade overseas working in executive positions in London and New York, Cowan returned to Melbourne, becoming Chair of the Trinity College Board. In recognition of his long connection with the college, the Bill Cowan Award was established in his honour, presented annually to a college graduate for outstanding achievements in the preceding year.

A world-renowned clinical transplant surgeon, Dr Susan Lim Mey Lee’s portrait shows the pensive doctor in her surgical scrubs with the pictorial emphasis on her skilled hands, loosely clasped at the left. In 1990, Lim became the first person to perform a successful liver transplant in Singapore, and in 2004 she pioneered the da Vinci Robotic General Surgery Program, transforming the field of minimally invasive surgery. The Hong Kong-born artist John (Zerunge) Young AM has incorporated digital images produced by the da Vinci robotic system as the border to his 2005 portrait of Lim. Now a Senior Fellow at Trinity, since 2010 Lim has sponsored the Dr Susan Lim Scholarship in Medicine.

Artist Evert Ploeg worked closely with Angus Trumble on the portrait, Unheroic Materialism (2019). Trumble was Director of the National Portrait Gallery from 2014 to 2018, and commissioned Ploeg several times during his tenure there. ‘He immediately struck me as someone I would like to capture in paint. He was such a unique, individual and highly informative “character”, as a portrait painter you can’t ask for more,’ Ploeg remarks.

Ploeg depicts his sitter mid-sentence and finger-raised elucidating his point, a reference to Trumble’s work, The Finger: A Handbook (2010), and the condition known as Dupuytren’s contracture, which Trumble developed in both hands. The hint of a smile hearkens back to Trumble’s earlier publication, A Brief History of the Smile (2004). The former Secretary of the Trinity College Dialectic Society, Trumble died only months after being installed as a Fellow of the college.

The most recent work in the collection is that of Dr. Alison Inglis, AM (2023), who was installed as a Fellow of Trinity College in 2014. An Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Melbourne, Inglis participates in the wider museum sector through her presence on various boards, and occasionally loans items from her personal collection to select exhibitions. Some of these artworks can be seen on shelves behind Inglis in the portrait by Dena Kahan. The daughter of artist Louis Kahan AO, Kahan is better known for her botanical studies and still life works.

In its pairing of some of Australia’s leading artists with alumni across many spheres of work and society, the Trinity portrait collection celebrates artistic and academic achievement and continues to inspire new generations of students.

Find out more about the portraits in the Trinity College Collection.