In Brenda Niall’s biography of Judy Cassab, the art forms of the subject and the author – life story and portraiture – are nested one in the other. As the story builds, one comes to accept that certain unsparing reflections on the subject’s personality and behaviour have as their authority Judy Cassab herself. She emerges as a heroine in a decidedly modern mode.

Reproduced in this biography (though not written about) is a late portrait of Cassab’s husband Jancsi Kämpfner. He sits smiling with his eyes obstinately half-closed, as if daring Jucókám to go beyond the visible to his inner self. Her response was to paint what she saw, thereby recording the challenge Jancsi mischievously posed, yet following her usual practice, which was to reflect the persona of a sitter as it was presented to her. In portrait after portrait by Cassab, we get the sitter as proffered, in public or private mode, and sensitively rendered by the artist. Cassab’s skill at capturing a likeness and correctly assessing a situation took her to the forefront of the art world in London and Australia, where she attracted many commissions to paint royalty and other public figures. Her commissioned portraits, like the intimate ones, were designed to give satisfaction to the sitter without undue flattery and to display an insight into personality. She did not waver from a commitment to civility, though it was constraining to a twentieth-century Western artist. Critics evidently regarded social good sense as detrimental to creativity. In Australia, Cassab was accused of ‘compromise’. She came to separate her role as portraitist from her artist’s ambition to push the medium of painting towards abstraction and the expression of an inner self.