Tributes are flowing for one of Australia’s most acclaimed portrait painters, Judy Cassab, who has died at the age of 95.

Cassab passed away in the early hours of Tuesday morning, with her two sons by her side.

The artist was the first woman to twice win the Archibald Prize for her portraits ‘Stanislaus Rapotec’ (1960) and ‘Portrait of Margo Lewers’ (1967).

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She was a prolific portrait painter, with Frank Packer, Margaret Whitlam, and Nugget Coombs among her subjects.

Born in Vienna to Hungarian parents, as a young Jewish woman she escaped the Holocaust by assuming the identity of her German maid.

In 1951 Cassab migrated to Australia with her husband and two young sons, already an accomplished artist.

In a past interview she told the ABC “painting wasn’t considered an occupation or a profession, it was considered a hobby”.

“So this most wonderful thing I had all my life was suddenly diminished into a hobby,” she said.

Judy Cassab was born in Vienna to Hungarian parents and came to Australia in 1950. Photo: ABC

But she pursued her hobby and quickly developed a reputation for her portraits in the Australian art scene.

“Judy came from Europe with a much more avant garde attitude and was not about just depiction but interpretation, so she bought a new interpretive dimension to portrait painting,” the former director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Edmund Capon, told the ABC in 2011.

Her son Peter Kampfner told the ABC his mother’s “unbelievable talent” was first unveiled at the age of just 12, with “a spectacular career that followed”.

“Her mother bought her a set of crayons for her twelfth birthday and she drew a drawing of her grandmother, which was the first drawing she had ever done in her life,” he said.

“And [it looks like it was painted] with the hand of a 50-year-old master. We still have that drawing today, it’s absolutely unbelievable. And she knew then that all she wanted do was become an artist.

‘Judy Cassab – portrait of an artist’ by Filippa Buttitta seen on display at the Art Gallery of NSW earlier this year. Photo: Getty

“You have to keep in mind that in the early days, women were looked down on in the art work, they weren’t generally accepted.

“But she was one of the stalwart breakthroughs that got women positioned in the art work today, as they are.”

He said as a young woman she agreed to marry his father on the proviso that he promise to “always allow her to be an artist”.

“It was an all consuming passion she had. She was completely obsessed with being an artist.”

Mr Kampfner said while his mother had suffered dementia for 14 years, a carer who had studied the disorder had treated her by “stimulating her brain constantly”.

“So we managed to keep her through really hard times of dementia where she continued responding and being articulate, right through to the end,” he said.

But he said she developed cancer six months ago after a melanoma formed on her face and was not treated early enough.

He said the cancer spread vigorously and “it was cancer that killed her in the end”.

-ABC