June Mendoza’s painting of John Gorton caused a sensation when it was unveiled. She remains the only woman to have painted an official portrait of an Australian prime minister.
June Mendoza had no idea when she accepted an invitation to paint Australian prime minister John Gorton in March 1971 that it would land her in the eye of a political storm.
Mendoza and Gorton’s time together at his official residence would turn out to be his last days in power. And over the course of the week, the doyenne of portrait painters would find herself with a front-row seat in Australia’s political history. Melbourne-born Mendoza, who died after a stroke on May 15, three weeks short of her 100th birthday, started out by sketching her classmates at school at Lauriston, a leading private all-girls school in Malvern.She was the daughter of a theatrical couple: her father, John Morton, was a violinist, and mother, Dot Mendoza, a composer and pianist who once played Dame Edna Everage’s bridesmaid Madge Allsop.
Reflecting on what Elizabeth II might have thought of her work after her death in September 2022, Mendoza admits she never knew.But the late queen did once murmur that her long dress resembled a dressing gown, so Mendoza re-did it.A young Princess Diana elected to pose twice, most famously in a red dress in front of a tapestry at Kensington Palace in 1984 for a portrait which hangs in an establishment club in the City of London.
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