Working as an art lecturer, William Robinson got a call telling him he had won the Archibald Prize.

Queensland-based Robinson was told he had to be in Sydney that afternoon.

“I can’t, I’ve got to feed the goats,” he reportedly replied, spawning the headline: Goat farmer wins top art prize.

Robinson won the 1987 prize with a self-mocking self-portrait on a horse.

Modest to a fault, he still rose to become one of Australia’s most distinguished contemporary artists.

Best known for his south-east Queensland landscape compositions and northern NSW seascapes, Robinson died at the age of 89 on Tuesday night.

Born in Brisbane in 1936, he developed a love of painting and music as a child and considered becoming a concert pianist.

Married at 22 and with a family to support, he instead embarked on a long career teaching art in Brisbane.

In the 1970s he moved with wife Shirley and their six children to a rural property where they raised cows, goats and chooks, before retreating to the Gold Coast hinterland.

Several of his paintings were selected for Australian Perspecta in 1983 and the Sixth Biennale of Sydney in 1986 before his Archibald success the next year with Equestrian Self Portrait.

By 1989, Robinson had retired from teaching and become a full-time artist.

He landed a second Archibald for Self-portrait With Stunned Mullet in 1995 and the prestigious Wynne Prize for landscape painting in 1990 and 1996.

The renowned painter of landscapes and whimsical self-portraits was on Wednesday remembered as a modest man of faith, family and the Australian wilderness.

“When you’re an artist, you’re a bit of a loner ­– you have a sort of isolated take on things,” Robinson once said of his career.

“So it is not so much direct humour, it is rather a commentary on life and people.”

William Robinson’s Equestrian Self Portrait was part of an interactive online exhibition of his work in 2020.

Robinson was awarded honorary doctorates by three Queensland universities and in 2007 was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for outstanding achievement and service to the arts.

The William Robinson Gallery opened at Old Government House in Brisbane in 2009 at Queensland University of Technology’s Gardens Point campus.

“It has been one of the highlights of my time … to work with Bill, his late wife Shirley and their family in realising the vision of the gallery,” QUT vice-chancellor Margaret Sheil said.

The Australian art world has lost a giant in the passing of Robinson, said Australian Galleries director Stuart Purves, who described him as “a man of outstanding care and human insight”.

Robinson’s work is represented in major galleries across the nation and afar, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

­–AAP