Reference: see Sydney Morning Herald, 27.5.24, p 14, article ‘Usurper tried to banish prime minister's portrait’ [John Gorton portrait]:
‘... Mendoza remembered Gorton as a decent and kind man. She had little time for the men who brought him down. The pair became friends and for years would dine together if they were in the same part of the world.
Her painting, decried as too informal to be accepted as an official portrait, could have been worse.
‘‘He came down the stairs at first in shirtsleeves,’’ Mendoza said. ‘‘And I said ‘Well, you know, jacket or something’. I made it more formal. He looked like the builder coming in from next door!’’
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.
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.
Mendoza described herself as ‘‘a backstage kid’’ as her mother toured Australia and New Zealand with the Australian Ballet, the Russian Ballet and JC Williamson’s stage company. June, who left school at 14, honed her craft drawing the dancers, often charging ‘‘ten bob’’. She later went to Swinburne Technical College to study art and acting.
By 17, she was illustrating book jackets, magazine illustrations, town-planning exhibition artwork, record sleeves, portraits and the adventure comic strip Devil Doone as well as acting on stage and in radio plays.
After she joined the 1940s Australian exodus to Britain, moving into a ‘‘bedsit with a gasring’’ in London’s Earl’s Court, she drew Belle of the Ballet, the popular strip in the 1950s comic Girl.
Mendoza eventually chose to specialise in oil portraits, painting some of the world’s most famous and powerful people. Several of her more than 1000 paintings are in London’s National Portrait Gallery. Many more hang in boardrooms, clubs and corridors of power across the world.
The late Queen Elizabeth II sat for her five times, her husband Prince Philip three times as well as her son, then Prince Charles, on three occasions.
Reflecting on what Elizabeth II might have thought of her work after her death in September 2022, Mendoza admits she never knew.
‘‘She never gives her opinion, very sensibly,’’ she said.
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.
The good and the great of the arts world came knocking too, such as Judi Dench, Joan Sutherland, Sean Connery, Barry Humphries, Sir Tom Stoppard, Sammy Davis Jr and even all 150-odd inhabitants of the first sitting of the House of Representatives in its new Canberra building in 1988.
Margaret Thatcher marked her 10th anniversary as prime minister with six sittings for Mendoza at Downing Street and Chequers. Thatcher, Mendoza said, was one of her most difficult commissions. Though courteous and professional, she was ‘‘so controlled. No particular body language, there was nothing there. I couldn’t pin it down.’’
British prime minister John Major was ‘‘an absolute gentleman’’, she said. The pair corresponded regularly until her final days.
A trailblazer, for a time, she was the sole female member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters.
Mendoza alway regarded herself as sort of ‘‘an oddball artist’’, and never really felt she belonged to a group. ‘‘I was always dashing home to the four children,’’ she said.
Despite many years in Britain, she kept her Australian egalitarian spirit. In 2004, when she went to Buckingham Palace to receive her OBE, she wore an outfit she found in a charity shop for ‘‘a fiver’’.
Her death was marked last week in London’s two great papers of record, The Times and The Telegraph, with both noting she always worked from life, never from photographs.
Mendoza would dismiss suggestion she was one of the world’s foremost or in demand artists but said painting most days was a key to her longevity.
‘‘Some artists paint St Paul’s [Cathedral] at sunset,’’ she would often say.
‘‘I just chose people instead.’’’
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