Nora Heysen was Australia’s first woman to win the Archibald Prize and Australia’s first female official war artist.

Australian art historian and biographer Janine Burke writes: “In this exemplary biography, a tender and complex portrait emerges of a tough and vulnerable artist – as all women artists must be.”

This assessment from one of this country’s leading authorities distinguishes this work that was developed with unprecedented access to the archives, family, and friends of Nora Heysen. Anne-Louise takes us into Nora’s world – from the young portraitist and flower painter working alongside her famous father, landscape painter Hans Heysen, to art school in London and an establishment that did not or would not fully recognise her talent. And from a passionate love affair against the backdrop of war in the Pacific, to her friendship with renowned artist Jeffrey Smart, to the ‘adopted’ son Nora took into her heart and home.

This is the story of an artist driven by an all-consuming desire to draw or paint – one who re-emerged at the age of seventy-eight when long-overdue attention restored her place as a significant artist celebrated by the nation’s major institutions.

Published by Fremantle Press and distributed by Penguin Random House. Available to purchase from Fremantle Press here and leading online and in-store retailers.

Praise for Nora Heysen: A Portrait

Ruby J.Murray Sydney Morning Herald:

Memoir can be brave. But it takes a different, unique form of courage to write another person’s life, and especially for a woman to write the life of another woman. Willoughby’sbiography of Heysen is an exploration of incredible talent and deep conflict. … many of us want the women who came before us to have been freedom fighters, feminists by default. But the truth is bigger and more complicated than that. Go read Nora Heysen: A Portrait.

 Dr Juliette Peers, Art Historian:

Willoughby’s wide-ranging, intelligent narrative directly captures the reader’s attention … the biography appears to be profoundly shaped by the aesthetic of its subject, as indeed a biography should be, but so rarely is.

Appropriate for Nora’s singularity, the first full biographical study of her is also a standout. Rarely are the multiple pressures that were brought to bear on women artists analysed in such detail and precision by Australian scholars as in Nora Heysen: A Portrait. 

Patricia Anderson – The Australian

 In Nora Heysen: A Portrait, Anne-Louise Willoughby has penned a delightfully anecdotal and sustained account of a woman whose imperative to paint might have born quite different fruit had she been born in 1960 instead of 1911. Willoughby weaves a colourful tapestry from the warp of Nora’s private life and the weft of her professional life …

Laurie G. a reader 

I’ve learned about Nora from your book, which is an excellent book. Your reference material, and bibliography, is just fantastic, the detail is amazing.