In Conversation

Maggie Beer AO

A cook, restaurateur, businesswoman and media personality, Maggie Beer has made a significant contribution to shaping our understanding of the importance of sustainable food production and consumption. In 1979, she and her husband Colin Beer opened the Pheasant Farm Restaurant in South Australia’s Barossa Valley, offering simple meals made from scratch using only seasonal ingredients they grew themselves. This back-to-basics philosophy earned the restaurant a devoted following and critical acclaim while quietly revolutionising the Australian food industry, encouraging a greater focus on local produce and rustic, regional cuisine.

Beer launched her brand Maggie Beer in 1993, producing pâté, jams, wines, vinegars, verjuice and dozens of other products that are sold in Australia and around the world. She has also written several cookbooks and appeared on The Cook and the Chef, The Great Australian Bake Off and MasterChef Australia. In 2014, she created the Maggie Beer Foundation to enrich the lives of older Australians, especially those in aged care homes, through food.

Del Kathryn Barton

A two-time winner of the Archibald Prize (with a self-portrait with her two children in 2008 and with a portrait of Hugo Weaving in 2013), Del Kathryn Barton’s figurative paintings feature fantastical characters posed against ornate – and sometimes psychedelic – backgrounds. Many of Barton’s intricate paintings are focused on women, often surrounded by an abundance of flowers, fruit and other symbols of femininity, fertility and motherhood. Although best known for her paintings, she also works with collage, sculpture, textiles and video. In 2022, Barton released her first feature film, Blaze, which she co-wrote and directed.

The portrait

This portrait brings together two extraordinary Australian women. Best known for paintings that depict womanhood and femininity, Barton sought to represent Beer as ‘a woman who has lived an incredible life … so beautifully her age, but transcendent of age’. For her statuesque, almost devotional likeness of Maggie Beer, Del Kathryn Barton invited her sitter to provide a list of her favourite fruit and vegetables from each season. These pictorial elements signify Beer’s passions and personality. Beer holds her favourite flower – a yellow rose – to her heart, a consciously romantic inclusion by the artist who said that her sitter ‘fills up a room with light and energy and generosity’.

The portrait of Maggie Beer AO was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery with funds generously provided by the Baillie Family Foundation.