L. Gordon Darling AC CMG (1921-2015), former company director, was the Founding Patron of the National Portrait Gallery. Born in London, Darling was schooled in England before serving as a major in the AIF during World War II. In the early 1950s he became a company director with BHP, a position he held for 32 years. For fifteen years during this period he was also Chairman of Rheem Australia and Koitaki Ltd. Inaugural Chairman of the Board of the Australian National Gallery from 1982 to 1986, in 1987, reflecting his interest in the visual arts, he founded the Gordon Darling Australian Print Fund, which has acquired over 6 000 prints for the national collection. In 1991 he established the Gordon Darling Foundation, which continues to provide funding and staff development opportunities for public art institutions Australia-wide. That year, too, he and Marilyn Darling initiated the Darling Foundation-sponsored touring exhibition Uncommon Australians: Towards an Australian Portrait Gallery, the interest generated by which led to the establishment of the National Portrait Gallery, housed first in the National Library of Australia, then in Old Parliament House and then in its own building on King Edward Terrace, Parkes.
Marilyn Darling AC (b. 1943), a Founding Patron of the National Portrait Gallery, was Chair of the Board of the Gallery from 2000 until 2008. Under her leadership the Gallery grew from a small institution located in Old Parliament House to a significant Federal institution in its own building. Having studied science at the University of Queensland, Darling worked in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Melbourne in the late 1960s, and undertook postgraduate study in the Medical School of Monash University from 1973 to 1978. Soon her interests expanded to a variety of social and cultural concerns, including the Victorian Children's Aid Society and the Victorian State Opera Foundation. By the mid-1980s she was a major patron of art, music and health in the Australian community. After she married Gordon Darling in 1989, the couple convened the exhibition Uncommon Australians: Towards an Australian Portrait Gallery, which toured nationally from 1992–1993. It demonstrated the potential for the institution and proved to be the impetus for its foundation. Since the Gallery was established in 1998 she has funded the acquisition of many diverse works for its collection. Marilyn Darling is the Deputy Chair of the Gordon Darling Foundation and a member of the National Gallery of Australia’s Gordon Darling Australia Pacific Print Fund.
Gift of Francis Reiss 2009
© Francis Reiss and June Orford
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