Adam Pynacker's 'Boatmen on the shore' (left), and Sam Leach's 'Proposal' (right), which won this the Wynne Prize. Edmund Capon, the director of the Art Gallery of NSW, which awards the prize, said he did not think the paintings' similarity would embarrass the judges ''one jot''. ''When the picture came up, I think everybody looked at it … and they all thought: 'What a wonderful painting - it looks like a late 17th-century Dutch landscape.' And that was my first instinct. So what?'' he said. ''It's not a copy. There's vast differences in detail, apart from the fact that the scale is somewhat different, too.'' It wasn't a problem to have one artist interpreting another accurately, he said. ''There's nothing new about that.''

Artist Sam Leach. Credit:Roger Cummins Artist Lindy Lee, who is one of gallery's 11 trustees who judge the Wynne, said all art was drawn from somewhere and Leach's canvas was small but had a ''vastness'' that was compelling to all the judges. ''For me it was just so obvious that it fell within a genre and in a way was a kind of homage to that genre that it wasn't particularly an issue,'' she said. ''And it's still not an issue that Sam's painting and Pynacker's painting have similar compositions.'' Leach being named winner was not at all embarrassing for the judges. ''Anything you do in the Archibald and Wynne, somebody's going to call it embarrassing for you. And so OK, fine, whatever. This is not embarrassing … I think it's a very interesting question about originality and uniqueness and what makes something authentic.''

Had the judges known how closely the painting reassembled Pynacker's work - held at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam - would they have given Leach the prize? ''This is always hard to say,'' she said, adding that having so many judges made it hard to know. Dr Lee said the resemblance was not brought up among judges. ''We have to view 1800 paintings,'' she said. ''We are not going to discuss the historical traditions and the lineage of each painting, and even not when it comes down to the final two or three. What you're talking about is the compelling nature of the piece itself.'' Leach said part of his practice involved ''appropriating'' past works and adjusting them. He did it controversially in 2008 when he adopted a pose from a well-known photo of Adolf Hilter for a self-portrait he entered in the Archibald Prize, which is held concurrently with the Wynne.

As for the Wynne's rule that the landscape be Australian, that wasn't a problem, either. Leach said his painting that took out the Wynne was ''a projection into some kind of idealised future'' and that people saw landscapes ''through a certain kind of constructed idea of what a landscape should be''. Sydney Morning Herald art critic, John McDonald, said Leech's painting was ''basically a copy'' of Pynacker's canvas with minor changes - most noticeably the removal of the boat and figures - and that there was unwritten assumption in the prize that it was for an original, Australian landscape. But Leach was a serious artist who liked to play visual games and use past images, he said. ''I don't think Sam is really the villain here. I think it's the judges who are culpable for making a rather silly decision … It is an embarrassment for the art gallery. It shows up how little judgment they showed.''