painter, printmaker and commercial artist, was born in Melbourne on 2 December 1910. He went to school at Ballarat, where he excelled at art 'but not much else (though he was a precocious reader)’, according to Griffiths. At the age of seventeen he began an apprenticeship in Henry Wicks’ commercial lithographic studio in Melbourne, on the second floor of the old St James building on the corner of Little Collins and William Streets – a building where Norman and Lionel Lindsay had a studio in 1892, as had Ernest Moffitt . Jack Castieu, who with Bernard O’Dowd established Tocsin , Australia’s first socialist magazine, also had rooms there at the time. In the 1920s it became Dalgarno’s home as well as workplace when he moved out of his parents’ house to set up his own studio and become involved in the revolutionary magazine Strife .

In 1926-30 Dalgarno attended drawing classes at the National Gallery School at night and met Nutter Buzacott and Noel Counihan . He also met other left-wing artists and intellectuals at the Swanston Family Hotel, Melbourne.Then he moved to Sydney and studied art with Dattilo Rubbo (1930-33) and occasionally at East Sydney Technical College (1932-34). In Sydney he shared a studio with Geoffrey Grahame (a crayon portrait of him by Dalgarno dated 1934 offered by Josef Lebovic in 1997) and with James Cant until Cant went to England. He spent much time at Packey’s {Packie’s?} Hotel in Sydney where the bohemian set met. In 1933 he returned to Melbourne and joined the Communist Party (which he left in 1949). He drew illustrations for the Bulletin and for Wireless Weekly .

In 1934 {1935 according to Bernard Smith} Dalgarno married Nadine Rankin and returned to Sydney (Sydney drawings exist dated 1934). He visited North Queensland in 1935 then settled in Brisbane for ten years. He began working as art director at Johnston & Jones’ advertising agency in 1936; Merewether notes that he produced advertisements for Bulimba Breweries by day and did cartoons for the brewery’s striking workers at night. According to Griffiths, this led to him being sacked from the agency. Later he claimed he was 'harassed by the security police’. He spent some time in North Queensland and began to take painting seriously, doing pictures of cane-cutters, fishermen and other workers. In 1940 he held his first major painting show in Brisbane, with Noel Wood: An Exhibition of Tropical Paintings . Soon afterwards, he began work as a camouflage artist for the RAAF based in Darwin, serving in North Queensland and the offshore islands. During this time he sketched station and mission workers and Aborigines. Some of his 1941-44 drawings of Brisbane Labor leaders and people of North Queensland were exhibited at Josef Lebovic’s gallery in 1997. He contributed to the important 'Australia at War’ exhibition at the NGV in 1945 and won a second prize in the industrial section.

At the end of the war he returned to Sydney and became involved in the Labor movement there. He joined with James Cant, Dora Chapman and other realist artists in founding the Studio of Realist Art (SORA), which had an active life from 1946 to 1949. He designed the cover of the SORA Bulletin . The Mae West , a wartime pen and wash portrait, was purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales from the 1948 SORA exhibition. In 1947-49 he also taught drawing and painting part time at East Sydney Technical College and was a member of the Contemporary Art Society (NSW). In 1947-48 four federal trade unions – the Ironworkers, Miners, Seamen and Waterside Workers, of Port Kembla, Newcastle, Cessnock, Lithgow and Wollongong – commissioned him to make a series of drawings and prints about working life, 'Australians at Work’ [1947 drawings in Lebovic, 1948 in Merewether]. W.S. Robinson of the Zinc Corporation of Australia (forerunner of BHP) commissioned him to paint and draw the miners of Broken Hill, leading to a solo exhibition of industrial paintings and drawings the SORA studio, opened on 16 July 1948 by James Boswell, lithographer, illustrator, painter, art educator, member of the Society of Industrial Artists and the Artists’ Association and art editor of London’s Liliput magazine. Some of his Broken Hill drawings were used as illustrations in George Farwell’s Down Argent Street: A story of Broken Hill (Frank Johnson, Sydney, 1949). The Sydney Morning Herald paid him to travel inland and record the faces of rural Australia, while film director Harry Watts employed him as artist on the 1947/48 film Eureka Stockade. Drawings of Chips Rafferty and Peter Finch on the set and other figures dated 1948 were sold by Josef Lebovic in 1997.

Dalgarno left for Europe in 1949 {1950 according to Griffiths}, first going to Czechoslovakia and joining up with the Artists’ Union, then studying in Paris at l’Ecole des Beaux Arts (1951-53) and learning lithography and etching at William Hayter’s famous Atelier 17 (1951 53). He became a habitué of the Café Flore and met existentialists and expatriate surrealists such as Tristan Tzara {BS}. He was fond of drawing the workers in the Paris markets (Les Halles) both on and off duty. He showed work in the Salon des Etrangers (1952) and held solo shows in 1953 and 1955.

In 1956, at the suggestion of Australian writer Hugh Atkinson, Dalgarno went to India where he remained for 20 years, basing himself at Bombay (Mumbai), setting up a lithographic workshop (active 1965-73), working as art director for Lintas International and lecturing in lithography at the Bombay School of Fine Arts. He was co-founder of publisher Editions Anarmali in 1956 and a member of the Board of Studies for the Fine Arts Faculty, University of Baroda (1968-75). He won various prizes in Paris and India, mostly for his graphics. He produced a great many lithographs and etchings in India on 'the ever-present plight of the poor and needy, the mysticism of gods and temples, the power of Indian philosophy and politics’ (Anna Griffiths), which were unrecognised in Australia. As always, his chief focus was on ordinary people.

In 1976, after the death of his second wife, Betty (Elizabeth Bridge), Dalgarno moved to New Zealand. He settled in Auckland where he continued to paint and make prints – and exhibit them – almost up to his death. He was a longstanding member of the Print Council of Australia, although he never again lived in Sydney {Merewether & Concise Dic are wrong in stating that he returned to Sydney c.1978}. 'In 1980, after attending the Pratt Center in New York, he added photographic techniques and colour to his printing repertoire, and experimented, none too convincingly, with abstraction’, Anna Griffiths wrote in his A&A obituary.

Sydney’s Rudy Koman Gallery exhibited his series of Broken Hill miners in 1984. His steelworkers were shown at Holdsworth Galleries in 1986 and his sheep-shearing series at David Ellis Gallery in 1988. An exhibition of his Australian social realist prints, Roy Dalgarno: Working Life , was at Wollongong City Gallery from 11 November 2000 to 21 January 2001. 'The steelworkers at their work remained the most inspiring thing for me’, he said in an interview not long before he died, 'and the steel works were like a huge modern cathedral’ (quoted Griffiths Art and Australia obituary). The exhibition closed just before Dalgarno died, in Auckland on 1 February 2001, aged 90. He was survived by his first wife, Nadine, and their sons Lynn and Lowan, his and Betty’s daughter Yogaratna Danielle, his third wife, Anna Brough, who lives in Auckland, and two grandsons, Loren and Samuel.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007