But The Lunar Savant has won the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, Australia's richest, for former Bathurst man Tim Storrier in the very first year he has entered.

“That picture should have been really called Lazarus, because the judges of the Art Gallery of NSW in their wisdom screened it out; it did not make the cut,” Storrier, now based in Bowral, said on collecting his $150,000 prizemoney.

“It’s interesting isn't it? It's two different institutions with two different value systems at work.”

Storrier’s painting shows Edwards, whose self-portrait made it into the finals, in a stained mackintosh with one shoe off and lit cigarette in hand.

Storrier, said judge Daniel Thomas, had gone outside his “personal mythology” to create an affectionate, teasing “friendship painting” of a wild fellow artist. Fellow judge Wendy Sharpe said the image was both disturbing and playful. 

Dagmar Cyrulla won a highly commended for a semi-nude self-portrait titled I Am Woman.

McLean and Storrier have been good friends for a decade after meeting at the Ray Hughes Gallery, and they share a poetic quality in their differing painting styles.

“The first thing I noticed was he had very, very nice manners,” Storrier said. “He was deferential, and any old fool falls for that.”

Asked if the portrait was produced in the “spirit of the morning after” following a memorable get-together between the artists before sitting, Storrier said: “I couldn't possibly comment.”

“The whole thing is really a metaphor for his personality essentially. What you notice with McLean’s work, as Daniel Thomas was pointing out, is that all the figures he uses in his paintings are self-portraits in one way or another. The red nose is not really a commentary on his thirst, but the fact that his face in his paintings tend to have a clownish quality to them.”

The shoeless foot, Storrier said, was a metaphor for vulnerability. The moon alluded to Edwards’ nocturnal working hours.

Portraiture was not only getting a likeness, but also “finding the expression to explain the character you are looking at” and required an “intense concentration thinking about that individual”.

McLean sat for the portrait shortly after returning from New York, and he said Storrier had shown the disconnect he felt after that exhilarating visit.

Storrier winning the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize was a tragedy: “I was hoping for a nice Christmas present.”

Earlier, Storrier repeated his criticism that the board of the Art Gallery of NSW had been taken over “by a postmodernist cabal” driven by fashion and political caution.

“When you’ve got a prize like the Archibald Prize, it’s designed to be merit-based; that’s its purpose, to attempt in difficult circumstances to choose the best painting. Now that is almost impossible if you apply postmodern theory; identity politics comes into it,” he said.

“It becomes important to them that they notice the background of the artist, whether it is an ethnic person or an Indigenous person, a woman, possibly transgender, and if you look at the hang for god’s sake – they’ve got a painting done by boys from Sydney Grammar prep school. The only reason I can think why they hung that would be basically to compete with [HSC Visual Art exhibition] Art Express.”

Storrier won the Archibald Prize in 2012 with his portrait The Histrionic Wayfarer (After Bosch).