It is administered by the trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales[2] and awarded for "the best portrait, preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in Art, Letters, Science or Politics, painted by an artist resident in Australia during the twelve months preceding the date fixed by the trustees for sending in the pictures".

In 1992 the Packing Room Prize was established, in which the staff who receive the portraits and install them in the gallery vote for their choice of winner.

Since 1999, Sydney based law firm Holding Redlich have sponsored a Salon des Refusés People's Choice Award.

[19] Max Meldrum criticised the 1938 Archibald Prize winner, Nora Heysen, saying that women could not be expected to paint as well as men.

Heysen was the first woman to win the Archibald Prize, with a portrait of Madame Elink Schuurman, the wife of the Consul General for the Netherlands.

[20] In 1953, several art students, including John Olsen, protested against William Dargie's winning portrait, the seventh time he had been awarded the prize.

[26] As a result of the controversy, the application form for the Archibald Prize was modified to make it clear that the subject must be painted from life.

[29] Another controversy involved the 2000 Archibald winner, when artist Adam Cullen lodged a complaint with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, that it had used his painting, Portrait of David Wenham, in a television commercial.

[30] In 2002, head packer Steve Peters singled out a painting of himself by Dave Machin as a possible winner for the Packing Room Prize.

[31] In 2004, Craig Ruddy's image of David Gulpilil, which won both the main prize and the "People's Choice" award, was challenged on the basis that it was a charcoal sketch rather than a painting.

[32][33] In 2008, Sam Leach's image of himself in a Nazi uniform made the front page of Melbourne's newspaper The Age[34] and sparked a national debate about the appropriateness of his choice of subject matter.