Alfreda Marcovitch MK Doherty

The subject of this portrait by Alfreda Marcovitch is Muriel Knox Doherty (1896–1988), who was principal nursing officer for New South Wales and Queensland for the Royal Australian Air Force Nursing Service. The painting is now in the collection of the Australian War Memorial, Canberra.

Raised in Newcastle, New South Wales, Alfreda Goninan studied under artist Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo in Sydney and was a student in Paris in the 1920s. She married Radoje Marcovitch, a prominent Yugoslav diplomat and journalist, and lived in Yugoslavia for 20 years. Alfreda Marcovitch escaped Europe with her two children just prior to the 1941 bombing of Belgrade by the Nazis; her husband is presumed to have died during the blitz.

Marcovitch and Doherty knew one another from Sydney’s Abbotsleigh girls’ school, where Doherty was an untrained teacher, and Alfreda her student. Doherty joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration following the cessation of hostilities in 1945, when she was appointed matron to the recently liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. She was awarded the Royal Red Cross for exceptional services in military nursing and her harrowing experiences were later published in Letters from Belsen 1945.

Doherty, then 52 years, sat for this portrait every afternoon for a week, dressed in the Royal Australian Air Force Nursing Service uniform she had worn during the war. Marcovitch often included intriguing backgrounds in her portraits; in this instance, the spacious and light-filled hallway of artist Desiderius Orban’s Sydney studio, with its dramatically receding archways.