The European Collection

In the decade following its establishment in 1881, the Art Gallery of South Australia began building a permanent collection of contemporary European paintings and sculpture for Adelaide. Many of the works subsequently acquired, the majority in fact, were British and, like the Gallery’s two splendid works by the ‘Olympian’ painter J.W. Waterhouse, The favourites of the Emperor Honorius (c.1883) and Circe Invidiosa (1892), originated as prominent, well-reviewed exhibits at the Royal Academy’s annual summer exhibitions. But there were also continental purchases, thanks to the Sydney and Melbourne International Exhibitions of 1879-81, and the Melbourne Centennial Exhibition of 1888, to which collections of paintings by living artists were brought from France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Spain. Prior to 1899, the Gallery acquired almost all of its continental paintings in groups from the various national commissioners at those exhibitions. These tentative beginnings provided the foundation for all of the Gallery’s subsequent collecting of international art.

It was not until Sir Thomas Elder bequeathed part of his fortune to the Gallery in 1898 that it became possible to envision a broadly representative collection of European art. In the following year, Harry P. Gill, the Gallery’s Honorary Curator, travelled to Britain to buy works for Adelaide. Gill spent a large proportion of the Elder bequest on eighty-nine works of art, including thirty-four oil paintings, most of them purchased from or through Arthur Tooth & Sons. In one stroke, Gill had acquired works by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Aubrey Beardsley, Émile Claus, William Fettes Douglas, Henri Fantin-Latour, Benjamin Leader, Frederic Leighton, Edward Poynter, Frederick Cayley Robinson, Giovanni Segantini, George Watts and William Bouguereau. Even though these were contemporary, or nearly contemporary works mostly by living artists, they were nevertheless the single most important group of acquisitions in the Gallery’s history since they brought to the collection a model of consistently high quality and comprehensiveness that in future would guide its collecting in other areas.

Throughout the twentieth century, contemporary British art continued to be an important area of concentration and the Gallery’s collection today provides an encyclopaedic survey of modern British art: works by the Pre-Raphaelite artists Edward Burn-Jones, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; an icon of British sculpture, the cast of Alfred Gilbert’s Eros (1892-93); masterpieces by members of the Camden Town Group (Walter Sickert, Harold Gilman, Malcolm Drummond and Charles Ginner); the Bloomsbury Group (Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry); Wyndham Lewis, Henri Gaudier Brzeska; as well as masters of the mid-twentieth century, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer,  Ben Nicholson, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Gilbert & George, Frank Auerback, Howard Hodgkin, Mark Boyle, Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Long, Leon Kossoff and Hamish Fulton.

Apart from a very few minor, early acquisitions, the historical branch of the European collection was not initiated until 1907 when the Scottish-born merchant, politician and collector David Murray, bequeathed to the Gallery a large collection of 3000 German, Netherlandish, French and Italian Old Master prints and a few drawings. Included in the bequest was a sum of money which enables the Gallery to continue to buy prints. This area is now one of the richest and is certainly the largest of the Gallery’s collection. The greatest European masters are represented: Andrea Mantegna, Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Titian, the only print every produced by Peter Paul Rubens (St Catherine of Alexandria), Rembrandt, Claude Lorrain, Francisco Goya and many major modern artists. Murray’s core collection was greatly enhanced by subsequent buyers and benefactors. One highlight of the works on paper collection is in the area of eighteenth- and nineteenth—century English prints. Here are included satirical and political prints by William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson, George Cruickshank and James Gillray, as well as William Blake’s Book of Job, Turner’s Liber Studiorum, and a selection of Pre-Raphaelite prints and drawings by William Holman Hunt, John Millais, Aubrey Beardsley, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and others.

Other areas of the works on paper collection have been developed in more recent years. First edition sets of Goya’s Disasters of War, The Caprices and The Follies were purchased with funds from the Government Grant since the 1960s. The European drawing collection, although less extensive than the print collection, includes fine examples of the work of Jacopo Tintoretto, Taddeo Zuccaro, Federico Barocci, Luca Cambiaso, Anthony van Dyck, Guercino and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, among other great European draughtsmen. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists are also represented, including French works by Eugène Delacroix, Jean-François Millet, Pierre Bonnard and the Impressionist Camille Pissarro, as well as the German George Grosz and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Other highlights of the European graphics collection include prints by Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gaughin, Édouard Manet, Auguste Renoir, Marcel Duchamp, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Emil Nolde, Käthe Kollwitz and Edvard Munch.

It was not until the mid-twentieth century that the Gallery began to purchase in a systematic way European Old Master paintings and sculptures. The Gallery was greatly assisted in this difficult task by a succession of prudent advisers and agents based in London, commencing with Kenneth Clark (1949-54) and Hender Delves Molesworth, then Keeper of Sculpture at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Clark secured a number of French paintings by members of the Barbizon School, Camille Corot and Charles Daubigny, as well as important paintings by Salomon van Ruysdael and Gaspard Dugher. These promising beginnings led to the development in just under fifty years of a remarkable Old Master collection with the following important strengths: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture (Robert Peake the younger, George Gower, Marcus Gheeraerts the younger, Cornelius Johnson and a follower of Hans Holbein); Dutch Painting of the Golden Age (another, earlier masterpiece by Salomon van Ruysdael, works by Balthasar van der Ast, Jacob van Ruisdael, Philips Wouwerman, Willem van de Velde the younger, Gerrit Dou, Nicolaes Maes, Jan Both, Adriaen Verboom, Jan van Os, Jacob van Strij); sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian art (Garofalo, Bonifazio Veronese, Scipione Pulzone, Luca Giordano & Guiseppe Recco, Francesco Solimena, Gaspard Dughet, Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa, Francesco Stringa, Luca Ferrari, Francesco Guardi and Rosalba Carriera); seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British portraiture (Anthony van Dyck, Peter Lely, Godfrey Kneller, William Hogarth, Joseph Highmore, Allan Ramsay, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, George Romney, Thomas Lawrence, Henry Raeburn, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable), and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French painting (Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer, Nicolas de Largillière, Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre, Jean-Jacques Bachelier and a rare suite of four landscapes, The times of day by Joseph Vernet).

The collection of European decorative arts consists of around 2000 objects ranging in date from the late sixteenth century to the present, and (as with the oil paintings) with a decidedly British bias. It includes furniture, textiles, metalwork, jewellery, ceramics, glass and wallpapers. Although a few European decorative arts objects were acquired during the last decade of the nineteenth century, serious collecting in this area commenced with the 1904 purchases — under the bequest of Dr Morgan Thomas — of several hundred contemporary and historical British (and a few French) ceramics, along with some glassware. The next purchase was an outstanding selection of Arts and Crafts objects, mostly metalwork, bought from the New Zealand International Exhibition in 1907. Sir Samuel Way’s bequest in 1916 contained many historical works, and changed the emphasis of the collection to include several objects from t he eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The most significant single decorative arts purchase of this early collecting period was the splendid Morris & Company tapestry of 1917. The collecting of decorative arts objects lost focus from the 1920s to the 1940s, when all manner of gifts were accepted and little was purchased, and it was only in the late 1940s that systematic purchasing recommenced, initially with contemporary Scandinavian glass and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British furniture. These purchases continued to be augmented by gifts from many donors, in particular Gladys Penfold Hyland, who in 1964 presented, along with paintings, a fine collection of British porcelain, furniture and silver, including a rare late sixteenth-century standing salt. Since the 1970s, donations from many private collections have considerably enriched the holdings, especially donations of British ceramics, furniture, textiles, silver and glass. Purchases in the 1980s of a group of Bloomsbury objects from the Omega Workshops and furniture by Carlo Bugatti and Memphis broadened the collection. In the last decade, the collection has been greatly enriched through numerous gifts and a few purchases of works from the British Arts and Crafts Movement — most notably of Morris & Company furnishing textiles, embroideries and wallpapers. Purchases of furniture by the influential Charles Rennie Macintosh and by the Regency cabinet-maker George Bullock form part of a general policy to add to the collection with outstanding representative examples suitable for permanent display.

Also in recent years the Gallery’s collection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European sculpture has been transformed by the generous gift by William Bowmore of a major bronze by Antoine Bourdelle, and by the purchase of Mr Bowmore’s splendid collection of twenty bronzes by Auguste Rodin. Since the 1970s, the Gallery has tried to compensate for the longstanding bias towards contemporary British art. Prominent contemporary American and continental art has therefore been sought and acquired for the Gallery’s permanent collection, including works by Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Duane Hansen, Kenneth Noland, Felix Gonzales-Torres (USA); Mimmo Paladino and Enzo Cucchi (Italy); George Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Rainer Fetting, Ulrich Rückriem, A.R. Penck and Nikolaus Lang (Germany).

The Art Gallery is justly proud of the quality and scope of its European collection which, despite scarce resources and the considerable disadvantage of our location far from the hub of the international art market, have nevertheless assumed a prominent place among international art museums all over the world, to whom we regularly lend works of art for major exhibitions. Perhaps more than any other area in the Gallery, the European collections have benefited from the passionate support, encouragement and generosity of successive generations of donors and benefactors. Three donors deserve special acknowledgement: James Fairfax AO, the late Mary Overton AM, and above all William Bowmore OBE. As the collection expands, their indispensible contribution to the Gallery’s development not only endures but grows in importance.

Director

This page was last checked on 19 April 2005

back to COLLECTIONS