The Gallery and its Collections

The Art Gallery of South Australia is Adelaide’s splendid treasure house, holding one of Australia’s finest, largest and oldest public art collections. Founded in 1881, only 45 years after the establishment of the colony — now state — of South Australia, the Gallery is situated across North Terrace from Adelaide’s commercial centre, and surrounded by the State Library, the state’s museum and the University of Adelaide, at the heart of a leafy cultural boulevard.

South Australia was proclaimed in 1836 as a British province for free, non convict settlers, the only such ‘progressive’ colonisation undertaken in Australia. Adelaide from its earliest days has been a civilised, liberal, well-planned and attractive capital city. With a strong tradition of interest in and support for the arts it has produced more than its share of significant Australian artists, all of whom are well represented and displayed in the Art Gallery. Adelaide hosts Australia’s oldest, largest and most important multi-arts festival, the biennial Adelaide Festival, to which the Gallery has always made a lively contribution.

The city, however, has been neither very large nor very rich, unlike major museum cities in Europe and the United States, or for that matter Melbourne and Sydney. Yet for more than a hundred years the Art Gallery of South Australia has enjoyed generous private patronage: nearly 90% of the collection comprises gifts of works of art or purchases made with private money. This is the highest proportion of private benefaction of any state or federal art museum in Australia. The collection has been carefully and astutely assembled in certain productive periods, and private benefaction has been similarly carefully nurtured. Nonetheless, the small annual fund provided by the South Australian Government has been vital for the acquisition of contemporary works, or works representing areas less familiar to the public and therefore less likely to attract donors.

The Gallery’s large collection has areas of special strength. It is now generally recognised as holding the most balanced collection of Australian art in the country, and in particular, the finest of all collections of nineteenth century Australian art. The Australian collection reflects Adelaide’s balanced view of Australia, free from the rivalry between the larger art capitals of Sydney and Melbourne but self assured about its own traditional cultural identity as the third largest art-producing city in Australia. Every mainland state shares a border with South Australia, encouraging in this state a more centralist view of the nation’s culture. The Gallery’s collection of European art from the late fifteenth century onwards — of paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings and the decorative arts — is the second largest in Australasia. The European collection includes one of the most representative collections of British art outside Britain, covering all media from the sixteenth century to the present. Most Asian cultures are represented in the Asian collection which has some outstanding individual works, especially from Japan. An area of great depth is the South-East Asian ceramic collection, one of the finest in existence. Our collection of Indian and Indonesian textiles from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century is also held to be one of the most outstanding in the world.

The Gallery’s treasures are housed in a handsome building, purpose built over four periods which is renowned not only as one of the city’s most beautiful and historical buildings, but also as having Australia’s most attractive museum interior. The earliest part of the building, the present Elder Wing of Australian art, was built in the grand Victorian museum style at the end of the nineteenth century. The adjoining classical Melrose Wing of European and Asian art, the colonnaded gallery façade and vestibule were constructed in 1936 as part of the celebrations of the centenary of the state of South Australia. A rear wing for facilities, offices and temporary exhibitions was opened in 1962. In 1996 the size of the Gallery was doubled with the opening of the capacious, award-winning West Wing, accommodating temporary exhibitions, elaborate facilities and expanded collection display areas, especially for contemporary art. Today, the four parts of the building are architecturally integrated into a harmonious whole. Undertaken concurrently with the construction of the new West Wing funded by the South Australian Government was extensive restoration and refurbishment of the existing building. A substantial art conservation program has been conducted and in addition to cleaning and restoration of works of art, many hundreds of paintings have been reframed in styles appropriate to their period. Similarly suitable period style pedestals have been constructed for the sculptures.

The attractive interiors and carefully displayed collections and exhibitions ensure that viewing at the Art Gallery of South Australia is a particularly memorable experience. However more important is the high quality of Adelaide’s collections which have been built up over more than a century, with some moments of specially intensive growth.

The Gallery’s large collection is divided into three collection areas – European, Australian and Asian art. (The art of the United States of America is incorporated into the European collection.) The Art Gallery of South Australia began its life in 1881 principally as a museum of contemporary academic painting and sculpture from Europe, particularly from Britain, a natural reflection of colonial South Australia’s imperial ties with the motherland. The Art Gallery was officially opened in June 1881 by Queen Victoria’s grandsons, Prince Albert and Prince George (the future King George V). A number of colonial South Australian paintings were also acquired in the early years of the Gallery, but in the first decade and a half of the Gallery’s history, the collection grew in a rather conservative Anglocentric and undistinguished manner.

Then in 1897 the wealthy pastoralist and businessman Sir Thomas Elder generously bequeathed £25 000 to the Gallery ‘to be spent on the purchase of pictures only’. This was the first large bequest or gift to any Australian museum and for a time, until the National Gallery of Victoria in 1905 received the benefit of the more generous Felton Bequest, the ‘National’ Gallery of South Australia had by far the largest collection development income in Australia. Adelaide’s collection was about to be transformed. The Elder Bequest also provided the incentive for the Government to erect a purpose-built Art Gallery to house the Bequest’s purchases. That building is now the Gallery’s Elder Wing.

The Gallery did not have a full-time professional director until 1934. Before this time artistic advice, including recommendations of acquisitions, was most usually provided by honorary curators. The most important of these, and indeed the most distinguished professional in early Australian museology, was Harry P Gill, a painter and teacher, who advised the Gallery from 1892 to 1909. He was responsible for most of the first Elder Bequest Fund acquisitions. He also oversaw the design of the elegant Elder Wing. Gill’s first Australian acquisition made with Elder Bequest funds include many of the Gallery’s outstanding and much loved paintings — Frederick McCubbin’s A ti-tree glade (1897), Sydney Long’s The valley (1898), Tom Robert’s Australian icon, A break away! (1891) and Hans Heysen’s Mystic Morn (1904). European acquisitions made using the Elder Bequest in Gill’s time were very much more interesting than the Gallery’s previous European purchases and included Henri Fantin-Latour’s Poppies (1891), William Bouguereau’s Virgin and Child (1888), Giovanni Segantini’s Spinning (1981) and Frederic Leighton’s The feigned death of Juliet (1856-58). For one hundred years the Gallery received funds from the Elder Bequest, a bequest which substantially enhanced the collection and provided the impetus for the fine tradition in both benefaction and acquisitions that followed.

The next major benefaction, the bequest of Dr Morgan Thomas in 1903, was even more generous, £65 000 being divided between the Public Library, the Museum and Art Gallery — the three institutions having at that time the same governing board. The Gallery’s first purchases of decorative arts and Asian ceramics, now very important areas of the collection, were made with the Morgan Thomas Bequest which has remained a significant funding source for the decorative arts. Morgan Thomas Bequest funds in the past also enabled purchases of important Australian paintings and major European and Old Master paintings.

The first decade of the twentieth century was indeed a golden age of acquisitions. In 1907 the Gallery received its next major benefaction, that of David Murray. Over 3,000 Old Master prints were given in this bequest and the following year a further 1,600 prints were acquired from the benefactor’s estate. David Murray also bequested money to establish a print room and to fund acquisitions of prints. Many thousands of Old Master and modern prints and drawings have been added since then, making a total approximately 18,000 works. This is the largest of the Gallery’s collecting areas — but the least known. Because works on paper are fragile and light-sensitive they have to be stored in darkness and can be displayed only infrequently. David Murray initiated what has become one of the finest (and one of the few) comprehensive Old Master print rooms in the Southern Hemisphere. Strengths here include prints by Dürer and his German Renaissance contemporaries, Italian prints from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century, Rembrandt and other Dutch and Flemish artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Goya and other major European and Australian nineteenth and twentieth century artists.

By the time of Gill’s resignation in 1909, the future pattern of the Gallery’s collections was largely set. Unfortunately however, collection development over the next forty years was relatively undistinguished, and did not live up to the promise of the first decade of the century. Only a small number of major works were given or purchased over this very long period. Some excellent purchases were made by Louis McCubbin, Director 1935-1949 (and son of the Heidelberg School painter Frederick McCubbin), among them paintings by his father’s colleagues Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder, David Davies and Tom Roberts and a number by Frederick McCubbin himself.

In 1922 when the Gallery began actively collecting photographs, it was the first art museum in Australia, and indeed one of the first in the world, to acknowledge photography as a creative art medium. A similar milestone was achieved in 1939 when the Gallery purchased a watercolour by Albert Namatjira, and thus became Australia’s first art museum to buy work by an Aboriginal artist. In the 1940s, the Gallery was also the first art museum to acquire Aboriginal bark paintings, an area of the collection that has subsequently been greatly expanded.

In the first half of the twentieth century an attempt was also made to establish a collection of European Old Master paintings. Nonetheless it was not until the end of the 1940s that the Gallery began a more systematic approach to collection development that would illustrate the history of European paintings and sculpture from the Renaissance onwards. Thus the Gallery’s considerable collection of Old Master paintings, one of the few in this part of the world, began to grow only from the mid twentieth century. In 1949 Kenneth Clark, one of the best known British art historians, connoisseurs and museum directors of the time, agreed to be the Gallery’s overseas adviser and over subsequent years recommended the purchase of a number of major works. Among these were Old Master landscapes by Gaspard Poussin and Salomon van Ruysdael, works which laid the foundation for the Gallery’s important seventeenth century landscape collectionn, a collection which demonstrates clearly the emergence of the Western landscape tradition. Clark was also responsible for the purchase of nineteenth century French works by Corot and Daubigny and twentieth century French works and twentieth century British works, including the first painting by Lucien Freud to enter an art museum. Today the most popular of Clark’s purchases in London are the three Australian colonial masterpieces by John Glover, A Corrobery of Natives in Mills Plains (1831), A View of Mills Plains, Van Diemen’s Land (1833) and, above all, A view of the artist’s house and garden, in Mills Plains, van Dieman’s Land (1835).

The 1950s and 1960s were very productive collection building years for the acquisition of Australian and European works, belonging to both the past and present. Further generous bequest funds came to the Gallery over this period: the A.R. and A.M. Ragless Bequest (1947 and 1953), the d’Auvergne Boxall Bequest (1954), the smaller bequests of J.T. Mortlock and Maude Vizard-Wholohan (1950), and the V.K. Burmeister Bequest (1956). With funds from these and the earlier bequests, the wisdom of London advisers and astute Gallery staff and trustees, many major works were acquired. The most memorable act of benefaction during this period however, and one of the great single gifts to an Australian art museum, was that of Gladys Penfold Hyland in 1964. She gave in memory of her husband, Frank Penfold Hyland (with whom she helped build the collection), six Old Master paintings including works by Salomon van Ruysdael, Thomas Gainsborough, Richard Wilson and George Romney. In addition she gave a fine collection of British ceramics, furniture and especially silver, the most significant work being the exceptionally rare Elizabethan Standing salt, 1583/84.

In 1967 the Gallery changed its name from the National Gallery of South Australia to the Art Gallery of South Australia, the earlier name having been an anachronism since 1901 when the self-governing colony of South Australia joined a federation of states to become part of a new nation, the Commonwealth of Australia. In 1969 the Friends of the Art Gallery was formed as an activities organisation whose membership over the years has also provided funds for purchases in most of the Gallery’s collecting areas.

Unlike the 1950s and 1960s, in the 1970s very few early Australian or European paintings were purchased, acquisitions mainly being contemporary. One of the outstanding works acquired in this decade was the large 1974 concrete sculpture by American artist Donald Judd, a work specifically designed by the artist for a site in the garden behind the Gallery. Much of the Gallery’s large and representative Thai, Cambodian and Vietnamese ceramic collection was also acquired in the 1970s. The support and advice of Dr T.B. Hunter in the development of the Asian collection from late 1970s is gratefully acknowledged. The late 1970s saw the first acquisitions of Aboriginal Western Desert dot paintings, the Gallery being the first art museum to recognise this extremely important new development in Aboriginal art from Central Australia. In the 1980s and 1990s this collection has grown to become, arguably the finest in existence.

In 1981, the Gallery celebrated its centenary with the establishment of a Foundation, heralding a new era in collection growth. In its first decade, the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation was the major source of acquisition funds enabling the Gallery to purchase some of its finest works. European master works purchased during this period include paintings by Claude Lorrain, Jacob van Ruisdael, Salvator Rosa and Joseph Highmore and Alfred Gilbert’s famous sculpture Eros (1892-93). Colonial masterpieces include Charles Conder’s A holiday at Mentone (1888), Arthur Streeton’s Early summer – gorse in bloom (1888), Eugene von Guérard’s Stony rises, Lake Corangamite (1857) and Australia’s earliest-known oil painting, John Lewin’s Fish catch and Dawes Point, Sydney Harbour (c.1813). Two very attractive Japanese screens were also purchased through the Foundation.

Many outstanding contemporary Australian and foreign (especially German) works were purchased during the 1980s. In the 1980s and early 1990s some of the finest works were added to the Old Master drawing collection largely begun in the 1960s. The Gallery’s drawings include remarkable sixteenth-century examples by Tintoretto, Luca Cambiaso, Federico Barocci, Taddeo Zuccaro, Francesco Vanni, seventeenth century works by van Dyck, van Goyen, Salvator Rosa, il Guercino and Pietro da Cortona, and eighteenth-century drawings by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and others. Many of these were acquired with funds from the V.B.F. Young Bequest received by the Gallery at the beginning of the 1980s.

The 1980s were memorable for a new group of Gallery donors. Howard Michell AC and Christine Michell became the most generous donors to the Gallery’s fine and balanced Australian decorative arts collection, especially colonial silver, and have also donated considerable funds to strengthen the mid twentieth century Australian painting collection. The James and Diana Ramsay Fund was established and has become the Gallery’s most generous continuing capital fund, enabling the purchase of major works in most collecting areas. James Ramsay AO and Diana Ramsay AO enabled the purchase of the landscape by Jacob van Ruisdael, Napier Waller’s mural The Pastoral Pursuits of Australia (1927), and Christian Waller’s 1936 stained glass window. Other regular private donors include Molly Lowe, Tom and Judie Phillips, Gwendolyn Tennant, Jock and Fayette Gosse, J.H. and C.Borthwick and others.

Above all, Max Carter AO, who had been a donor at the end of the 1960s, became the Gallery’s most generous donor in the 1980s. Following a systematic Gallery acquisition plan, he purchased for the Gallery nineteenth-century Australian paintings which have been crucial in developing the finest and most representative collection of Australian colonial art. Among his purchases are major works by Eugene von Guérard, Martha Berkeley, Jacob Janssen, Isaac Whitehead and one of the three earliest oil paintings of Sydney, indeed of Australia, executed in about 1799 probably after Thomas Watling.

In the 1990s many new donors came to the fore to help build specific areas of the collection. The European Old Master collection has been the focus of particular attention. James Fairfax AO provided money for the purchase of the Gallery’s splendid double portrait by van Dyck and also gave four beautiful small landscapes by Claude Vernet.

In the Gallery’s history William Bowmore OBE has been the most generous donor to its European collection with his donation of over twenty works. These include paintings from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries by Garofalo, Ambrosius Benson, Nicolas Largilliére, Francesco Guardi, Thomas Lawrence, William Blake, John Constable and Théodore Géricault, twentieth century British works by Walter Richard Sickert and Augustus John, and a major sculpture prominently displayed in the Gallery’s courtyard, Antoine Bourdelle’s dramatic Virgin of the Offering (1921). In addition, William Bowmore offered for sale at a reasonable price and terms his collection of twenty sculptures and one drawing by the great French sculptor Auguste Rodin, and which was purchased jointly by the South Australian Government and Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation. This is one of the largest collections of works by Rodin in existence.

During the 1990s Michael and Mary Abbott were the most generous donors to the Asian collection, particularly in the area of Indian and Indonesian textiles. Other donors include Caroline Simpson, to the colonial collection, John Watson, to the Asian collection, and Douglas and Barbara Mullins, who have given early Australian paintings. Numerous bequests include those of F.G. Halloran, Reg Longden, Kathleen Marston and the Adelaide artists Ivor Francis and Dora Cant.

The most generous cash donor to the Gallery was Mary Overton AM. Indeed in the 1990s she became the single most generous cash donor for acquisitions in the history of any Australian art museum. Her large gifts of money have enabled the Gallery to acquire eleven significant Australian nineteenth century paintings including five portraits by the leading Colonial portrait painter, Thomas Bock and major works by John Glover, William Strutt, Alexander Schramm, Charles Hill, Robert Dowling and W.C. Piguenit. Here gifts have also enabled the Gallery to buy its largest Old Master painting, an Italian Baroque still-life by Luca Giordano and Giuseppe Recco and a dramatic Italian Baroque religious painting by Mattia Preti. Her generosity has allowed the Gallery to acquire what is perhaps its finest portrait, the portrait of Ferdinando de’Medici by Scipione Pulzone painted in 1580. In the Asian area, Mary Overton has provided funds for the acquisition of our most striking and rare works in the entire Asian collection, a pair of thirteenth century Japanese Shinto sculptured figures.

The Gallery’s British arts and crafts collection of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which was well established by 1910, was extensively expanded in the 1990s.

Morris & Company textiles which once furnished Adelaide houses, especially those belonging to the wealthy Barr Smith family, have been received from many donors. The Gallery now has one of the most important collections of William Morris textiles outside Britain. In the early 1990s the Art Gallery of South Australia established a permanent gallery for the display of Morris & Company and other objects from the British Arts and Crafts Movement.

The 1990s has also seen the continuing growth of the contemporary art collection and in this has been assisted by generous funding from F.H. Faulding & Co. Limited in the area of contemporary South Australian art and from Santos Limited (who previously sponsored the exhibition program) who  generously provided an ongoing grant for the purchase of contemporary Aboriginal art. The Rhianon Vernon-Roberts Memorial Fund has enabled the Gallery to expand its collecting of contemporary Australian metalwork and jewellery.

In the Gallery’s long history, the 1980s and 1990s could indeed be considered its finest decades for acquisitions. Over two thirds of the Australian works on display have been acquired in the 1980s and 1990s, and over one third of the European and one half of the Asian displays.

The Gallery’s recent vigorous collection building has coincided with an extensive and varied exhibitions program. Australian, European and Asian art of the present day has been seen as much as the art of the past. Since 1990, as part of each Adelaide Festival, the Art Gallery of South Australia has staged the Adelaide Biennial exhibition of recent Australian art, a major event in the Australian contemporary art calendar. The Gallery has long had an effective education program, which is continuing. Education Officers have been an important part of the Gallery since the mid-1960s, and the voluntary Gallery Guides organisation was established in 1972 for public tours. Since the early 1990s an extensive publication program has meant that a growing number of scholarly and popular books and catalogues on specific areas of the collection is available. The Gallery has become a small and lively art publishing house.

In outlining the history of the Gallery is it essential not to lose sight of the crucial contribution that committed staff, directors and supportive Board members have made over the decades.

Christopher Menz
Director

This page was last checked on 12 January 2006

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