John Bell AO OBE (b. 1940) is Australia's preeminent Shakespearean actor and director. Having graduated from the University of Sydney in 1962, he spent five years at the Royal Shakespeare Company in England before returning home and co-founding Sydney's Nimrod Theatre. Nimrod staged premieres and influential interpretations of many Australian plays in the 1970s and 1980s and also initiated a distinctively Australian Shakespeare style. In 1990 he founded the Bell Shakespeare Company, which has set the standard for Australian performances of the playwright’s works ever since. Bell acted for the company in the roles of Shylock, Macbeth, Henry V, Titus Andronicus, Malvolio, Coriolanus, Richard III, Leontes, Prospero and King Lear – several of them over different productions, many years apart.
Nicholas Harding was at the Company's first productions and conceived of a painting of Bell as he watched him in The Merchant of Venice in a stifling tent in 1991. Over the course of a decade he made several portraits of the actor. This 'study', to which Harding returned repeatedly, evolved alongside the much bigger John Bell as King Lear, which won Harding the Archibald Prize in 2001.
Gift of the artist 2010. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program.
© Nicholas Harding
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