W. B. McInnes

William Beckwith McInnes (18 May 1889 – 9 November 1939) was an Australian portrait painter, winner of the Archibald Prize seven times for his traditional style paintings.

McInnes was born in St Kilda, a suburb of Melbourne, to Malcolm McInnes and his wife Alice Agnes, née Beckwith. Despite lack of family artistic tradition, he was keen to draw from the time he could hold a pencil. In 1903, at 14 years of age, he enrolled in the drawing school of the National Gallery of Victoria under Frederick McCubbin. Later he moved up to the painting school under Lindsay Bernard Hall.

He won his first prizes for drawing the figure from life, and for painting a head from life, and shared the prize for a landscape in 1908.

Soon afterwards McInnes held a successful show of his paintings at the Melbourne Athenaeum Gallery in conjunction with F. R. Crozier, which was followed in 1911 by a journey to Europe where he did much landscape painting and made acquaintance with the masterpieces of Rembrandt, Velasquez and Raeburn.

McInnes was represented in London at the exhibition of the Royal Institute of Painters in oils in 1913.

He returned to Melbourne in the same year, where a one-man show was held at the Athenaeum gallery and nearly everything was sold. In 1916 he acted as locum tenens for Frederick McCubbin, master of the school of drawing at the National Gallery of Victoria, during McCubbin's six months' leave of absence. McInnes was temporarily appointed to the position in 1918 after McCubbin's death, and in 1920 he was permanently appointed.

In 1921, he won the first Archibald Prizes for portraiture.

McInnes revisited Europe in 1925 and found he was in great demand as a portrait painter. For many years he was unable to spare time to do landscape work. In 1928 he exhibited with the Royal Academy, and in 1933 he visited England again to paint the Duke of York (later King George VI).

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