Rodney Pople Self-portrait after Henry Raeburn

Rodney Pople’s self-portrait is a homage to Sir Henry Raeburn’s 1748 painting Portrait of the Reverend Robert Walker skating. Raeburn was a Scottish artist known for his portraits of society figures of the day.

‘I loved the painting and I thought it could make a witty self-portrait,’ says Pople. ‘Apart from its elegance and magic, I liked the obvious metaphor of skating on thin ice. For the reverend maybe that was to do with religion, but artists always seem to be skating on thin ice.’ Pople sat with the idea for the portrait for several months. Then he received a postcard of that very Raeburn portrait from his eight-year-old son Oscar, who was in Britain last year. ‘He had visited the National Gallery of Scotland and he chose that postcard to send me because it reminded him of me. I loved that coincidence and thought, “Wow, let’s do it”.’

Pulling it off, however, was a real challenge. ‘I was paying tribute to such a fantastic, glowing painting. I did it in watercolour/tempera on paper mounted onto canvas. [Raeburn’s portrait was oil on canvas.] I grew up in Tasmania and some of the landscape there is a bit Scottish, a bit wild, with rivers that can ice over in winter and I wanted to bring some of that personal significance to it. I tried to keep the sweeping movement and pay homage to Raeburn, but invest the picture with an ironic edge in terms of my own appearance in it.’

Pople was born in Launceston in 1952. He gained a diploma of fine arts (photography) at the Tasmanian School of Art and undertook postgraduate studies in sculpture in London and New York. He has been exhibiting annually since 1978 and has had regular solo shows in Sydney and Melbourne. He was a finalist in the 2001 Roche Contemporary Art Prize, which toured Australia. This is the third time that Pople’s work has been represented in the Archibald Prize. Former subjects were artists Anthony Galbraith and Richard Goodwin.