William Robinson

William Francis Robinson was born on 16 April 1936 in Brisbane, Queensland. He trained as a teacher at the Queensland Teachers' Training College, Kelvin Grove, from 1954 to 1956, then began an art teacher training course at Central Technical College in Brisbane on a scholarship, completing an Art Teacher's Diploma and a Diploma in Drawing and Painting in 1962. He worked as an art educator for much of his early career, including a period teaching at Central Technical College and later at what became the Queensland College of Art.

Robinson held his first solo exhibition at the Design Arts Centre, Brisbane, in 1967. His inclusion in Australian Perspecta at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1983 and in the Sixth Biennale of Sydney in 1986 is widely cited as the point at which he came to national prominence. He became best known for large, multi-perspective landscapes of the Gold Coast hinterland and northern New South Wales, and for a body of self-portraits, often set against farmyard animals or dense rainforest. He won the Archibald Prize for portraiture in 1987 and 1995, and the Wynne Prize for landscape painting in 1990 and 1996, becoming one of only a handful of artists to win each prize more than once. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2007 for service to the visual arts, and held honorary doctorates from Queensland University of Technology, the University of Southern Queensland, and Griffith University.

In 2009, Queensland University of Technology opened the William Robinson Gallery at Old Government House, Brisbane, built around the QUT Art Collection's holding of more than 320 of his works, including both his Archibald-winning paintings. It is one of the only galleries anywhere dedicated entirely to a single living Australian artist at the time it opened.

Robinson died on 26 August 2025 in a Brisbane hospital, at the age of 89. His family described the death as peaceful, with Robinson surrounded by family. The news was reported by the Guardian, the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, and both English and German editions of Wikipedia, which give his exact dates as 16 April 1936 to 26 August 2025.

Robinson's reputation rests on a fast, sustained institutional embrace: national prominence following Australian Perspecta in 1983 and the Sixth Biennale of Sydney in 1986, back-to-back major prizes through the 1980s and 1990s, and a major retrospective organized by the Queensland Art Gallery in 2001 that toured to the National Gallery of Australia in 2002. A further comprehensive survey, William Robinson: The Transfigured Landscape, was mounted by the QUT Art Museum and the William Robinson Gallery in 2011. Writing on his Wynne Prize record in 2011, critic John McDonald argued that "the most average landscape by William Robinson, who won the prize in 1990 and 1996, would have murdered everything else in the room" that year, a measure of how far his standing among Australian landscape painters outpaced his rivals in critical eyes. Commentary consistently centers on his unconventional, rotating multiple-perspective compositions, which distinguish his rainforest and farmyard scenes from conventional single-viewpoint landscape painting.

Robinson's market has historically run through Australian auction houses and Brisbane and Sydney dealers rather than the international secondary market. His recorded auction high is AUD 696,000 for Landscape with Sunset and Self Portrait, sold at Sotheby's Sydney in May 2007, according to the Australian Art Sales Digest; this figure rests on a single specialist database and has not been independently cross-checked against a second source. Subsequent results have stayed well below that figure, for example Farmyard, 1982, which brought AUD 264,000 including buyer's premium at Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, in April 2014, and Fading Light, Springbrook to Beechmont, 2002, which brought AUD 306,818 including buyer's premium at Menzies, Sydney, on 19 November 2024. Coverage in the Sydney Morning Herald has described his works generally trading in the range of roughly AUD 25,000 to AUD 500,000 at auction, with six-figure results common for major landscapes.

Robinson's market is thin by international standards and almost entirely Australian, so any single auction result, including the 2007 record, should be read against a small number of comparable sales rather than treated as a stable benchmark. There is no catalogue raisonne, and the strongest verification resource is the William Robinson Gallery at Queensland University of Technology, which holds the largest public collection of his work. Following his death in August 2025, Philip Bacon Galleries in Brisbane and Australian Galleries in Sydney and Melbourne, his longtime commercial galleries, are the most likely points of contact for works coming to market, though neither has issued a formal public statement describing estate representation as of this profile's data date.