Artist Ralph Heimans captures final meeting of Jane Goodall in Tanzania

Washington: Ralph Heimans is familiar with royalty. The Australian painter’s subjects have included Queen Elizabeth II, whose portrait hangs in Westminster Abbey, Charles as the Prince of Wales and Prince Philip – as well King Frederik and Queen Mary of Denmark.

To that esteemed list, he can add a new kind of royalty: Jane Goodall, the celebrated English anthropologist and the world’s preeminent expert on chimpanzees, who died last year aged 91.

“You can’t get a more far cry from the palace than the forests of Tanzania,” Heimans says. “It was just an extraordinary experience – I really admire her, and painting someone I admire is just a thrill for me.”

His oil-on-canvas portrait of Goodall was unveiled in Washington, where the Jane Goodall Institute is based, at a ceremony on Tuesday night. It was held at Ned’s, a private members’ club a block from the White House.

The story behind the painting is itself long and remarkable. Heimans was a guest of the Commonwealth Day Observance Service at Westminster Abbey in 2012, where Goodall gave the keynote speech. It was just days before Heimans would paint the Queen.

He was there with his agent, Penny Mountbatten. As Goodall spoke, they turned to each other with the same thought: she should be next. “I said, ‘One day, you are definitely going to paint that lady’,” Mountbatten says.

It took a while. Eleven years later, in early 2023, Heimans was approached by a man after giving a talk at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. It was Doug Kendall, former chairman of the Jane Goodall Institute’s board, who introduced the two.

So began a three-year project that has produced seven artworks, including the large-scale portrait of Goodall in-situ in Tanzania. She posed twice at her home in Bournemouth, England, including a three-hour session sitting on the floor.

“You hear about Jane Goodall the legend, the icon,” says Mountbatten. “And there she was, this very shy, very humble, very gentle lady in her home. She did say ‘there are two Jane Goodalls’ – there’s my public face, and there’s the private me. She was really quite shy and uncomfortable, in a sense, about having a portrait done of her personal self. But for the cause, she would do any anything.”

In 2025, Heimans travelled to Gombe National Park in Tanzania with Goodall, on what would become her final visit to the chimpanzees she had studied and documented all her life. They were preparing to depart when the matriarch, Gremlin, arrived with her two youngest sons, Grendel and Goodalli, in tow.

“Everyone’s jaws dropped,” Heimans says. “They literally came down the mountainside to the foot of her home, somehow intuitively knowing that she was about to leave.

“They led her gradually on this walk into the forest. Jane would come a few steps and then stop and wait. And they would go a few steps further and check if she was following. And slowly they led her to a mango tree.”

That is where Goodall is situated in Heimans’ portrait. It was but a moment – he could not sketch her as he would during a normal sitting. Instead, he had to rely on his memory and imagination.

“I knew immediately it was just the most precious moment, and it had to be the subject of the painting. It told the whole story,” he says.

“And then we let Jane be taken in by the chimpanzees into the forest. We were all in tears, basically. It turns out this was the last time she saw her chimpanzees.”

Many artists sought to paint or photograph Goodall over the years – sometimes by asking, sometimes by showing up at her office, says Anna Rathmann, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute USA. Most of the time, she politely declined.

But she was drawn to Heimans for his calibre and his vision. “In Jane-world, there’s a phrase that we often use called ‘Jane magic’. That’s what this was, truly,” Rathmann says.

The institute is talking to a select range of public-facing organisations where the main piece could find a wide audience. Goodall wanted people to see the painting “and be inspired by her journey”.

Former High Court justice Michael Kirby, who sat for Heimans in the artist’s fledgling days and helped build his profile, counts both Ralph and Jane as friends.

Kirby and Goodall served as patrons of the Australian animal protection organisation Voiceless. He describes them as kindred spirits.

“Once again, Ralph has told a story of the subject’s environment,” Kirby says by email. “Jane’s displays the innate commonality of humans with primates, and their right to respect – not as things, but as living, thinking creatures.

“Primates sharing the planet with humans. Not the same. But sharing life, and the world with them.”

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