The combination of bloke and gentleman might sound paradoxical, but it is hardly unique in Australia. Remember John Thompson’s book The Patrician and the Bloke (2006), which neatly poised the two personae as they revealed themselves in the career of historian Geoffrey Serle. Bevan’s book on Dobell rather tips the balance in favour of the bloke. Its closing words crystallise the apparent paradox – ‘He was Sir William Dobell. He was, and in Wangi he remains, Bill’ – but the title is more suggestive of where the predominant stress of the narrative lies. Just plain William: no handles, please. Even plainer Bill: that’s how he was habitually known to the mates that he liked to yarn with in the Wangi pub, Bevan reckons – I am aping here the author’s relentlessly colloquial style – and it is very much the perspective from the Wangi years that prevails, taking up nearly 300 of 460 pages. (There follow forty pages of useful endnotes and bibliography – though, inexcusably, no index).

‘The combination of bloke and gentleman might sound paradoxical, but it is hardly unique in Australia’

Bevan can hardly ignore the artistic achievements that earned Dobell his prizes and his knighthood, and he is particularly adept at describing some of the painter’s most famous works, including the controversial Archibald portrait, and at capturing some telling details of the artist at work: his choice of materials, his meticulous brushwork, and so on. Bevan also has a practised journalist’s talent for evoking the landscapes in which Dobell lived and worked – again, particularly the terrain around Wangi. There are some arrestingly vivid set pieces in this fashion that only occasionally seem to strain for effect. (Mark McKenna’s verbal landscapes, in his Manning Clark biography, are rather subtler.)

William Dobell, 1942 (photograph by Max Dupain, National Library of Australia)

It is the picture of Dobell the man that is more consistently skewed. The most dominant image throughout is of a nice, unaffected, ordinary Aussie, the sort who is happiest with a beer in his hands; this is the one that Bevan insistently returns to again and again, even as he affords us peeps of a rather more extraordinary, eccentric, even slightly exotic creature: a hobnobber with other extraordinary, and often titled, high flyers in the artistic and social worlds (Maie Casey, Zara Holt, Russell Drysdale, Patrick White, the duke of Edinburgh); a dandy who could get togged up in silk suits and bow ties; the proud owner – but non-driver – of grand cars and a James-Bond-style speedboat; the skilful strummer of classical (never popular) tunes on a grand piano that he installed in his house at Wangi; the obsessive redesigner and refurbisher of that house, which ended up looking far from the ‘simple cottage’ it had once been.

‘It is the picture of Dobell the man that is more consistently skewed’

These brief insights into a more complicated and sophisticated figure remain no more than glimpses: they are only incidentally relayed by the witnesses that his biographer has assembled, and never taken up for sustained discussion. But the apparent reluctance on Bevan’s part to explore these aspects of his subject is as nothing compared to his evasive, or at least incurious, treatment of Dobell’s least blokey side: his homosexuality – and this is surely more than just a ‘side’, as far as the man, if not the artist, is concerned. Given Dobell’s own extreme reticence on this matter, there may be little more than hearsay to go on, but modern biographers need to show they have made some efforts to see what might be behind the ‘wraps’ that their subjects put up to protect themselves and to check out the rumours spread by others.

There is one, particularly intriguing rumour – with a significance that goes beyond anything to do with Dobell’s sexuality – that Bevan doesn’t seem to have any inkling of at all; and this is the story that in the early 1930s, while still a student in London, Dobell took himself off to New York, where he met the assertively gay artist Paul Cadmus, presented him with a locally painted work (a view of the East River, held in the Cadmus collection at the now defunct Midtown Galleries), and possibly had an affair with him. There is another rumour that Bevan simply repeats from a secondary source, and then leaves hanging: ‘according to a biographer of [Harold] Stewart, Michael Ackland … “Harold became a lover of William Dobell and Donald Friend.”’ I myself have never been able to find any supporting documentary evidence for this up to now, but Bevan gives no indication of having even tried to do so, and rushes on to his next subject. Again, he can’t ignore the subject of Dobell’s sex life any more than he can Dobell’s art – and there are other little peeps into it (most tantalisingly, of an alleged one-night stand with Patrick White). But by the end of the book, all we get is this rather slippery summation: ‘He was highly discreet about his sexuality, so secretive that doubts remain whether he was homosexual, but he loved the company of avowedly heterosexual blokes. He was the lavished guest of honour in high society who was just one of the boys at the pub.’

Whose ‘doubts’? Those of the other blokes from the Wangi pub or the author’s? It is not made clear, and the whole effect seems indulgently anodyne, if not sentimental.

So wedded has Bevan become to the myth of Dobell’s ordinariness that he has difficulties appreciating a cartoon purportedly showing the artist at home: ‘the way his house’s entrance is portrayed’ makes it look ‘much too grand’. This was surely the cartoonist’s point; and one has to wonder whether the element of caricature doesn’t capture something of its subject that a more conventional portraitist – or conventionalising biographer – cannot. (A salute as well to Dobell’s own inspired idiosyncrasies as a portrait painter.) ‘You could say he was well liked, without being known,’ says another of Bevan’s interviewees, referring to Dobell. Alas, that remains the case, for all the good things and good intentions that have gone into this book.