Sam Leach has been compared to Brett Whiteley and William Dobell. He not only won the Archibald Prize for his portrait of Tim Minchin, he also won first prize for "The best landscape painting of Australian scenery". But Adam Pynacker painted a picture of boatmen on the shore of an Italian lake in 1660 and as you can see, it's a straight copy.
Yesterday the artist said "For quite a while now, I've been obsessed with 17th-century Dutch painting, I haven't made any secret of where the painting came from".
But Brisbane gallery owner Philip Bacon said the use of artworks without acknowledgement of the source was a "dangerous road" for an artist. "It seems to me unwise not to attribute something that is a direct take" he said. Others scoffed at the notion, saying the age of appropriatiion was upon us and artists were referencing each other without any criticism at all.
Last night Sam Leach denied his actions constituted plagiarism in this context.
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