The Hon. John Howard OM AC (b. 1939) was Prime Minister of Australia from 1996 to 2007. A lawyer by profession, he was elected as the Federal Member for Bennelong in 1974, and was returned to the Parliament at every ensuing Federal election until late 2007, when he became the second Australian Prime Minister to lose his own seat in a general election. Howard described his wife, Janette (b. 1944) – the first Chief Patron of the National Portrait Gallery – as the 'love of his life' and his 'rock'. He remains Australia's second longest-serving Prime Minister, behind Robert Menzies – the focus of Howard's The Menzies Era (2014).
To prepare for this portrait, Josonia Palaitis took many informal photographs of the couple in the grounds at Kirribilli House, the Prime Minister's official Sydney residence. The Howards viewed the portrait several times over the course of the 650 hours it took Palaitis to create it. 'Foremost in my mind', Palaitis said, 'was to portray, in whatever way, a sense of relationship between the couple', whom she found 'sincere and unpretentious'.
Commissioned with funds provided by the Founding Patron, L Gordon Darling AC CMG 2000
© Josonia Palaitis/Copyright Agency, 2021
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