William Francis Robinson

William Francis Robinson was born on 16 April 1936 in Brisbane, Australia. He attended Junction Park Primary School and Brisbane State High School before training as a primary school teacher at Queensland Teachers' Training College, Kelvin Grove, from around 1954 to 1956. In 1955 he won a two-year scholarship to Brisbane's Central Technical College, where he later taught while completing an art teacher's diploma and a diploma in drawing and painting, finished in 1962.

Robinson taught art for decades in Queensland while developing a highly personal landscape practice built on shifting, multiple perspectives rather than a single fixed viewpoint. He came to national prominence through Australian Perspecta at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1983 and the Sixth Biennale of Sydney in 1986. He went on to win the Archibald Prize twice, in 1987 for Equestrian self portrait and in 1995 for Self portrait with stunned mullet, and the Wynne Prize twice, in 1990 for The rainforest and in 1996 for Creation landscape: earth and sea.

He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2007 for service to the visual arts. In 2009 the William Robinson Gallery opened at QUT's Gardens Point campus, dedicated to his work; QUT's holdings, now more than 320 objects, form the largest public collection of his work in the world. He continued to exhibit into 2025, with solo shows at Australian Galleries in Melbourne and Sydney and at Philip Bacon Galleries in Brisbane. William Robinson died on 26 August 2025 in a Brisbane hospital, at age 89, following a brief illness.

Robinson's landscapes, built from shifting, layered viewpoints rather than a single horizon, were credited with opening a genuinely new way of picturing the Australian bush. That standing was reinforced by two major surveys, William Robinson: A Retrospective, first at the Queensland Art Gallery in 2001 and then touring to the National Gallery of Australia in 2002, and by William Robinson: The Transfigured Landscape at QUT Art Museum in 2011, described by the museum as the most comprehensive exhibition and publication on his work to date. The critic John McDonald later curated a further exhibition of his work, The Eternal Present, at the William Robinson Gallery in 2017.

Robinson's recorded auction high is AUD 696,000 for Landscape with Sunset and Self Portrait, sold by Sotheby's in May 2007, according to the Australian Art Sales Digest. Subsequent results have generally been lower; Farmyard, 1982, sold for AUD 264,000 including buyer's premium at Deutscher and Hackett in Melbourne in April 2014. Press coverage in 2016 described his typical market range as roughly AUD 25,000 to AUD 500,000 depending on medium and scale, consistent with an artist whose demand is strong but whose auction appearances are relatively infrequent. His death in August 2025 marks the start of a deceased-artist market, a transition that historically can affect both supply and pricing for an artist's work.

No catalogue raisonne of Robinson's work has been published; the William Robinson Gallery at QUT and Philip Bacon Galleries function as the closest thing to an authoritative archive and exhibition record. His auction history is comparatively thin, with a documented high of AUD 696,000 set in 2007 and no confirmed higher result since, so individual sale results should be read with some caution rather than as a smooth trend line. His deep representation in Australian and international public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Vatican Museums, and the British Museum, is the strongest evidence of his lasting institutional standing. Following his death in August 2025, collectors should also expect the usual adjustments that accompany a shift from a living to a deceased-artist market, including changes in available supply.