Inside Archie 100: A Century of the Archibald Prize ahead of run at National Portrait Gallery

In reality though, while the Archibald Prize has run almost every year since it began in 1921 - the exception being the combined prizes of 1991 and '92, due to a change in the award's scheduling - there have only been 97 winners.

As well as accounting for the '91/'92 combination, there were two years in which the prize wasn't awarded - 1964 and 1980 - as no entry was deemed worthy.

Still, 97 works have taken home what is the country's top art prize. What's more, there are - again, theoretically - some 6000 finalist artworks that represent 100 years of Australian life, people, arts and culture. And this time it's theoretical not because of inconsistencies in the number of finalists chosen, but rather a question of how many still exist.

Tracking down these artworks has been a key hurdle throughout the research process of the upcoming exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Archie 100: A Century of the Archibald Prize.

A good many were in the care of institutions across the country - including the National Portrait Gallery and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which understandably has the largest collection of Archies - but others had disappeared without a trace.

"There are a lot of artworks out there that we neither have an image of nor do we know where they are," curator Natalie Wilson said in the 2021 documentary series, Finding the Archibald.

"We've contacted libraries, museums, galleries, all sorts of institutions all around Australia but these lost stories and histories are part of what we're trying to get to the bottom of with this research."

Throughout a three-year process - and in the lead-up to the award's 100th anniversary in 2021 - Wilson managed to account for 1700 of the 6000 works.

It was then narrowed down to Wilson's favourites - the worlds that not only told the story of the Archibald Prize, but the story of Australia, its people and how art had changed over that time.

"'It's a beautiful coming together of the Australian people through art, what we've cared about, what we've been thinking about at any given time," National Portrait Gallery director Bree Pickering says.

"[The Archibald] is responsible for drawing attention to the importance of art and culture. Everybody knows the Archibald Prize, even if they don't know other exhibitions, it's something that really looms large in Australia's imagination.

"It's very democratic in the fact that anybody can enter. In every town across Australia, there'll be someone who has at least entered the Archibald Prize. And so it becomes this moment, this thing that everyone's participating in and getting painted for it. Their mum's submitting an entry, their uncle's in the prize, their sister's won the prize. It becomes this expansive human project that's really exciting."

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Such is the significance of the Archibald Prize - the place that it has in Australia's collective cultural hearts - that it then caused another, potentially smaller, hurdle in the preparation of Archie 100. And that was the number of people who owned Archibald Prize paintings - who lived their days with them hanging on their walls - and were not willing to part with them.

Luckily, for those who are keen to see this in-depth look at the Archibald Prize, almost 100 works were not only tracked down and deemed suitable for the exhibition, but were able to be loaned for the duration of its time, originally at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and then on tour around the country before it's final stint at the National Portrait Gallery, which begins later this month.

Works include Fiona Lowry's portrait of Penelope Seidler, Vincent Namatjira's self-portrait, and Davida Allen's portrait of her father-in-law John Shera.

"I've never seen it before but I'm really interested to see Davida Allen's portrait of her father-in-law which she painted when she popped over and he was out watering the garden sort of half naked and he was completely nonchalant about that and it's just a gorgeous portrait of an older man watering his garden. And I'm excited to see that in real life," Pickering says.

It's interesting that, over the years, countless portraits of celebrities have featured and even won the Archibald Prize, among them Cate Blanchett, Roy and HG, Molly Meldrum, Donald Bradman, Deborah Mailman, Heath Ledger and Daniel Johns. And Barry Humphries, of all people, has appeared in more Archibald exhibitions than any other Australian celebrity.

But there is something special about the portraits of everyday Australians, such as the one of Shera that Pickering is so looking forward to seeing in person for the first time.

"The thing with the Archibald Prize - and what we experience at the Portrait Gallery, as well - is that the people come for the famous people, but they leave with the normal people. The works that touch them the most are works of people who are more everyday," Pickering says.

"So it just tells us that portraiture tells us something about our humanity that we want to connect with.

"Portraiture is the most accessible art and that's because human beings have been representing themselves and each other as long as we know. It's something that's an innately human thing to want to represent ourselves and to see ourselves reflected back to ourselves. Portraiture is often representational in a very normal sense."

Archie 100: A Century of the Archibald Prize is at the National Portrait Gallery from October 20 until January 28.

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