Sam Byrne (painter)

Sam Byrne
Sam and Florence Byrne in 1915
Born	Michael Eldrige Samuel (1883-07-10)10 July 1883 Humbug Scrub
Died	24 February 1978(1978-02-24) (aged 94) Broken Hill
Resting place	Broken Hill Cemetery
Nationality	Australian
Occupation	Painter
Years active	1955-1978
Known for	Naïve art, Folk Historian
Spouse	Florence Byrne
Signature

Samuel Byrne was an Australian naïve painter and folk historian who visually chronicled the rise of Broken Hill, from its frontier days right through to the establishment of a modern city. Without any formal training, Byrne took to painting when he was in his seventies after retiring from a lifetime working on Broken Hill's mines. His painstakingly detailed panoramas of Broken Hill's township were discovered by Leonard French, who brought him to the attention of Sydney and Melbourne's art connoisseurs. Byrne is best known for painting his memories of subjects that held a personal fascination for him; Broken Hill's rabbit plagues, Sturt's desert peas, dust storms, industrial riots, and pioneering mining scenes.^[1] As a trade unionist and having first hand experience of the harsh mine conditions, his works are often imbued with a working-class consciousness and show a deep sensitivity to the plight of the victimised. Although the media often compared him to Grandma Moses, as James Gleeson writes, Byrne "paints in a manner that is so consistent that we are obliged to acknowledge it as a personal style."^[2]

Of Sam Byrne, John Olsen wrote "no [other] Australian painter has portrayed, with such enduring simplicity and humanity, the world of the 1890s."^[3] Elwyn Lynn described the folk painter as a "raconteur in paint".^[4] James Gleeson described him as a "genuine primitive", an "innocent of art", whose visual experience has not been filtered by conceptions of style or technique.^[5]