Eric Smith (1919-2017), painter, was born in Brunswick, Melbourne, and trained in commercial art at the Brunswick Technical College before serving in the army during World War 2. After the war, he recommenced study at RMIT under the Commonwealth Rehabilitation Training Scheme. Smith and his wife Joy moved to Sydney in 1952, and he found work as a window cleaner at David Jones’s. When he won his first Blake Prize for religious art in 1956, the Sun reported that ‘window cleaner Eric Smith took only an hour to paint the Scourged Christ.’ Characterised as a ‘battler’, he initially painted in the bedroom he and Joy shared. In 1958 he, Joy and their children moved to Small St, Woollahra. Smith was to win the Blake prize five more times up to 1970. Notable for experimenting with diverse art styles, he also won the Wynne Prize twice, and the Sulman Prize in 1953, 1973 and 2003. In 1963, when he was in London to see his work hung in the Tate exhibition of Australian art, he received the Helena Rubinstein Art Award.
Eric Smith first entered the Archibald Prize with a strong self-portrait in 1944. He won the Prize in 1970, 1981 and 1982 with portraits of architect Neville Gruzman, art dealer Rudi Komon and composer Peter Sculthorpe respectively. The prize for the portrait of Komon survived a challenge from an artist who’d been stripped of the Archibald five years earlier for painting from a photograph. Smith acknowledged that he used photographs, but he also knew Komon, and had had multiple sittings with him. Smith’s paintings are in the collections of the National Gallery, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Queensland Art Gallery. Working almost until his death, he was the subject of a television documentary, Not Finished Yet, in 2012.